Well, part of the idea is that nobody does...and nobody should have to. I mean, you go to the Met or the Whitney to look at paintings, right? But you never, ever consider that you'll be able to absorb them all...art is just too real, just too detailed, just too large. Online art needs higher resolution than is currently available to even approach the offline experience...which, luddites aside, is what it should do. Online exhibits are much cheaper to maintain and offer no possibility of ruination for the original work, which makes them a beautiful alternative to expensive print reproductions and art exhibits which have viewing hours and limited space. Besides, two gig goes fast...consider 600 meg of mpeg-1 video clips at 1500 kbit each, another 250 meg of 600 kbit DivX clips and about 50 meg of rm "thumbnails", and hakf of that is gone already. Now combine that with those high res images I mentioned. What you have in your hand is a lot of space, taken up mostly by your higher quality choices -- choice which, as I've mentioned, is necessary to give digitized medium a "real world" feel.
Warhol did nothing that changed the world in any way. He did "pop art," meaning he did art that people liked, not art that was expressive. I've sat through lecture after lecture on how that fucking Campbell's can changed the world, and I still don't see it. It's just a soup can, it's not absurd or profound or even interesting, and the only real beneficiaries to the work he did were himself and the Campbells Soup corporation (who, I might add, would have been fools to sanction such a work, it was free publicity and people liked it. now, if it was a parody of a campbell's soup can, nobody would have ever seen it...Kaufman would have been sued into the gutter, and good riddance). All art has two major elements: extrinsic value and intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is what's on the page, what's in the song and so on. Extrinsic value relates what's on the page and in the song to the world outside. Kaufman's work was almost entirely extrinisic, meaning that in a world without popular culture he wouldn't have been an artist. And that's precisely the argument I'm trying to make: if we want to avoid work that's stale and derivative, which we do (and these are the elements Kaufman built his career on), we can't rely on fair use of other peoples' work.
And don't bring patents into this...patents have nothing to do with art, which is by nature about consumption of materials for the sake of creation and the fight against entropy that defines human existance, digital expression aside (though the argument can be made that these consume electricity). Many an artist has used a patented device to create art, from the chainsaw to some of the more ingenious fan brushed and colouring techniques. Patent laws do not affect artists in the least -- patent law affects businesses and thinkers. The similarity between IP and copyright and patents was only noticed as a result of the internet's merger of form, function and finance. Until an abstraction of each can be made conclusively, we're in danger not of losing our artists but of losing our ability to create art with ease (and that's not really a great loss; if it wasn't for the computer I'd take my hand to the page).
Somewhere in the last two years' rush to the internet, the concept of the image got lost. It used to be easy to find lots of pictures online -- almost every site was full of high res pictures of products and so forth. Then, around the time Akamai came out, IT people realised something: images robbed bandwidth. After all, did it make sense to have a nice 64k image taking up your server's time that would be better spent rendering a page or handling a credit card transcation? Well, it might -- to those of us still adjusting to the internet-as-money-maker concept, or anybody who really lives for content. But nowadays, it's almost impossible to have a really nice gallery of images. Consider this: one high res 2.3 mpixel (1800x1600) jpeg image with low compression takes upwards of 800k with no compression and 230 with plenty of it. Shrink it down, and you can fit it under the magical 60k mark, but you lose all your res and pick up a lot of block noise. The solution, of course, is the thumbnail -- but it's not complete. Thumbnails take time and a moderate level of knowledge to generate, and they take up space. 10 truly high res graphics of the type i described above, plus their thumbnails, plus an intermediate size for the poor suckers on dailup, and you're looking at 10 meg. Consider also that many servers are still charging webspace at a 1996 rate (at least, I haven't found one yet that would accept my site's 2 gig of mpegs, jpegs and tfifs without charging me at the ultracorporate rate of $500+/month), and it just doesn't make any sense to take your not-for-profit personal page or motion media show-off site and bring it online. If you do bring it online, you're stuck either paying a lot of money (thus forcing you to accept advertisements and bastardize all your hard work or beg for money) or reducing your graphics and media to heavily compressed closed source solutions like asf or rm (notice i didn't say asx or rmi...saving art should be the right of the browser).
Hopefully, somebody out there in the hosting world will realise that the death of the VC funded dot com will require a reduction in hosting costs to survive...or the invention of clever pricing plans to allow us spacehogs that don't push much bandwidth to colocate with bandwidth eaters with no space requirements, e.g. the drudge report.
Consider this: without fair use laws for artistic works, we would have more beautiful pieces and far less derivation in the fields of art, music and multimedia.
Now, this is just speculation, and kind of hypocritical -- a trip to epmf.dasmegabyte.org will show you that my "art" benefits so much from fair use that i'm pushing its legality. However, it's something to think about. How much would we *really* suffer if we couldn't use other peoples' works in reviews, collages or academic works? I mean, shit. Most of the motion video on the internet is derivative of offline media, and many pieces of art, music and motion video borrow heavily from popular entities. And these works are usually less enjoyable than the original and offer no real insight into anything. I mean, c'mon -- Park Wars was awful, not funny and not really a great parody of anything. The "all your base" craze was mildly amusing at first and tunnelled its way into cliche in less than the time it took to play all the way through zerowing. And I don't need to remind you of all the hideous flash videos out there that have taken advantage of the Budweiser "wossop" commercial, the mastercard "priceless" adverts or the plight of metallica and dr dre as seen through the eyes of us internet "subterraneans".
It's not suprising that when I visit the monthly Saint Rose JCA Poetry Slam that all I hear is rehashes of hallmark cards and Korn lyrics. This beleif that art must be built on top of other art is totally antithetical to the concept of free expression. Poetry is about combining words in a fashion that's totally different from the way anybody else would combine them to create a window into your thoughts. Art should be about expressionism -- making images the way you see them or feel they should be seen. And motion video should be about telling a unique story from a unique point of view (or, shouts my jackoff film professor of three months, it should show the truth -- which means it should show nothing but pictures from the lives of boring people). Where's the originality in constructing the same ironic mismatch of media, the same syncronicity of images on image?
Sure, copyrights are bad and I hate them (although I will kill the guy who stole my "akira" video and repackaged it with his name). But what are we really restricted from doing? Garner's Grendel was the Beowulf legend, but it was really nothing like Beowulf...it shared no words or storyflow. That was what made it a masterpiece without pulling from the respect granted to the 800 AD original. Animal Farm was made an allegory, not a scathing work of historical fiction, because allegory succeeded in illustrating the sadness far better than the original. And one could very easily argue that a hiphop track which creates a new loop rather than borrowing from a popular song can be just as good as one that borrows heavily...listen sometime to the work of the RZA, whose work on the Ghost Dog soundtrack included very few copyrighted samples.
Copyright law is an invitation; nay, a challenge, to the artisans of the world: We've blocked off one channel to create art -- art that could easily become complacent and derivative. It's your job to make something new, rather than waste your time riding the coattails of others. An artist needs paint, sure, but she doesn't necessarily need blue paint...she might not create the Giocanda, but she could easily create Guernica.
Alright, the government knows about me. I'm hardly shaking in my boots, because the information that they can get privately is no more verbose than what they could get already by running a credit check and talking to my mom. These would be their first two courses of action if they ever suspected me of pulling anything funny. Of course, nobody would begrudge the government the ability to phone up somebody's friends, their bank or their employer in the case of something prurious -- it's this ability which helps protect us from the truly troublesome elements. So why do we have such a huge problem if they're grabbing simple info about us before hand?
Simple. We're afraid of being profiled. If the government makes a list of angry loners, most of us would be on it, especially the goatse.cx kids. The things that we prize -- free software, free speech, high technology, geeky knowlege -- are red light topics. High school shooters play D&D and video games. Terrorists support "libertarian" ideals.
So I don't feel we should attack the government's right to collect information. I feel we should attack the use of profiling of any kind. There is too much basis and therefore prejudice in law; that's why unarmed black men get shot and why goth teenagers are roped into sensitivity training. Forget Gattaca...the government doesn't need DNA to alienate us. And if we don't halt this propensity, we'll suddenly find our rights to support fringe subjects slipping out from under us.
Yes, this is true. The shitty writing is completely seperate from the Noir style. Mickey Spillane didn't write his metaphors for his cat; he wrote them for a hip audience weaned on a terse print style. Jeter's amateur approach the the genre is an insult to decent futurable sci-fi and decent detective novels simultaneously, just as insulting as "Blade Runner 2" was to Phillip K. Dick, William Gibson, and anybody born since 1943 who had a modicum of talent or taste.
But don't consider this a pan of Jeter's style. He's quite good if you like utter shit, and judging from the "Ender's Game" following around here, you do.
First, this is bullshit. The web is not repurposed content -- it's the same as radio, just coming out of different speakers. You don't consider my Sherwood receiver at home to be a different medium than the Blau in my Passat. And, in a lot of areas, you can't have an honest FM station that will reach all your prospective listeners. A good example is Vermont's WEQX (I am listening online as we speak). It's one of the last great independent commercial stations in the world, and it's one of the few stations I've ever heard that will play what the DJs want to hear. But their transmitter is not powerful...it gets drowned out by powerlines and is nearly impossible to get indoors. Hence, I listen online at weqx.com. It's terrible quality, it get congested and the ads are stupid. But it satisfies my need for independent radio.
This is the type of station that should be online -- a station whos playlist is totally different from every other station in the world, both statistically and stylistically. And, for that matter, EQX has listeners all over the country. Do the ads for Stratton Mountain and the Vermont Lottery appeal to these listeners? Hell no! That's why they supplement the cost of their online radio with print ads. The advertising is being broadcast online, sure, but it's hardly repurposed. It's not even properly targetted. Arguing that EQX's advertisers get money from all of their online listeners to Alan Yando's snappy Lotto patter is futile, they don't.
I think this is a sensible law for some radio stations -- ones with nationally appealling ads, for coca-cola or ford motors or even Fox TV. But then again, those stations don't need to be online! The big advertisers don't deal with independent stations, because they can't offer the kind of run that would be cost effective. They deal with huge faceless corporations like ClearChannel, whose content from station to station does not vary anyway. In fact, ClearChannel's DJs are all nothing more than talking heads, with no humans manning the local station mics. They won't answer your requests, they don't understand local politics or personalities and they don't visit local businesses. In essence, ClearChannel stations over the radio are already netcasts...they're nationally broadcast playlists without regional content or any real insight into the listening audience.
I suppose the only consolation I have is that, so far, EQX is still online...and I can still hear the Live Lunch at work.
Building a market on advertising, when your customers are primarily people who are too cheap to pay for your content, seems to be the stupidest idea business has ever had. If you remember back in the days of 1999 (when I broke my e-business hymen with a small web company that did amazing work and made a lot of dough before being bought by a larger dotcom), everybody was about brand building, becoming the best known name in what they did. And of course, money would miraculously follow...offer the advertisers a huge name that they were plotzing to get space on. But somewhere along the line, people decided to start watching click throughs -- which was the nail in this type of business's coffin. Free content appeals to those of us who like free stuff, a class of people who aren't interested in impulse buys or leet gizmos. And of course, by the time decent content came about (and there is a lot of it around nowadays), the bottom had fallen so far out of this advert barrel for the remaining cash to spread far enough to cover the cost of truly great sites.
E-business, however, is not the same as what we call the "dot com" model. The dot com model is content for advertising. E-business is a more robust form of catalogue and phone business, which has survived for years and years before computers could count to 257.
Now, the trick is to find a way for all these wonderful content sites to stay cohesive, to make online newspapers a boon rather than a drag on print sales. The trick is to survive the stupidity of the branded marketting boom and move into an application and content model that is condusive to magnificent content but also will pay the bills. The internet has spent the past three years selling its cow for the magic bean of advertising, but it only grew into a small cactus. It's up to us -- the internet users, internet industrialists and yes even us open software paranoids -- to find a way to make the web work. I think it's going to take a lot of sacrifice -- hosting houses are going to have to drop their costs and standards will need to be opened rather than closed. Users will need to be educated in a way that benefits the 'net, because for every user tricked by a "your browser is not optimized" bar is one more who is wary of the new economy. And methods of payment will need to be found that don't require micropayments, advertisements OR goodness-of-your heart donations.
An important moment for all fans of popular films.
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The Art Of The Matrix
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· Score: 1
What I'm wondering is, where is my copy of "The art of Hackers?" When will we see "Tron: two decades of glowing polystyrene?" And of course, the long awaited "True story of The Net."
Actually, paintings do deteriorate due to viewing, and quite quickly. Photons bombarding the pigment cause the colours to fade like an old photograph. There are regulations as to how bright lights in a gallery can be and how many there are, as well as how many days out of a year a painting is viewable (the rest of the time it's in a dark climate controlled room). And remember, the Giocanda is only 400 years old...works from earlier times have only survived due to extreme storage facilities. The cave paintings around Cro Magnon, for example, survived because they've been in a cold fucking cave for ten thousand years. And the artifacts of Tutankhamun and Rameses II survived because they were buried in a stone coffin in one of the dryest areas in the world.
The digital age gives us great hope for preservation of everything, because we can copy sounds, images, motion and even DNA structures with perfect reproduction. But it will only be through the careful preservation of this information that future generations will be able to access it
If anything, and you can consider this a dig at DMCA if you like, it will be the number of copies of these artworks that will permit them to be preserved. Consider this: there is only one Mona Lisa -- if she fades, we can only guess at what her colour was. But there are millions of copies of Wing Commander IV. It's a relatively simple task to go through a few thousand of these, extract from each disc what data hasn't rot through, and compare it to the others. Combine that with huffman coding and CRCs and we can quickly reconstruct the original with perfection and certainty. You can't say that of the Venus DeMilo. And unlike other generations' copied mediums, we can trust the intermediary -- the cold, heartless eye of the scanner and OCR soft -- not to misspell anything or make up shit. Bemoan the need for proprietary copyrights if you like, but the digital age's perfect reproducability is the factor that will decide its permanent etching in the databases of the future.
Tell my mom. She's good at remembering useless details that nobody cares about and explaining them to anyone who listens. Plus she was born before the advent of the telephone.
I keep all my servers in the basement of my parent's house, and use my mother as the control mechanism. She is much more difficult to control than a PERL script, because she doesn't understand the concept of warning lights or switches. So I've hooked all of them up to speakers and I use mp3 files of songs she knows that correspond to warning messages. This leads to conversations like this:
"Hullo, mum? Is the server making noise?"
"Um, yes. I think."
"Is it the Barenaked Ladies."
"No...it sounds like Johnny Cash."
"Is it 'Johnny Yuma?'"
"No, that one about the car. 'One piece at a time.'"
"Okay, that means the switch is dead. You need to jab a pencil into the little grey box with the red triangle on it."
"Do you mean the one with the big sign that says 'don't touch?'"
"No, the one with the red triangle."
She's still easier to work with than BiznessOnline.com.
I'd just like to mention that i'm running the Rage Mobility 128 in my Powerbook, and kicking some major ass in Q3. It's hardly TOL, but better than some of the shit people bring to lanparties. Plus, the Mac platform has one huge benefit over PCs: when the frame rate dives, it has less effect on control.
And you buy a two button mouse if you want one, dumbass, nobody uses a trackpad for gaming! For the record, I use my apple pro mouse and mapped the apple key to jump...you can say that having my left hand do so much while my right does so little would affect my killrate, but in fact the precision and smooth action of the pro mouse has had the opposite affect. Stuff your boomslang, APM!
I know posting MS info on slashdot is like wearing Nikes to a WTO meeting, but i've had Apache running on my CE 2.11 device (cassiopeia E-100, heavily tricked out w/ 802.11 networking) for a while. I used it to serve pages during presentations, or did, rather, before i got my PowerBook. The Agenda is massively underpowered compared to my lil' pocket, but i suppose having linux on it greatly reduces the effects of that slow ass chip (the casio has a 133 MHz MIPS chip, hardware hackable to 166-199).
Re:Apple humiliates Gmome, KDE, Linux
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Ask Robert Young
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· Score: 1
Apple has never been known to create bad software, and nobody who had used it would agree with you. Their OS, while not bulletproof (it's cooperative MT, for chrissake), is beautiful and a joy to work with. AppleWorks is a simple, easy to use suite which was always more full featured than MS' Works offering, and the recent software offerings: Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Apple DVD and especially the subtle and incredible burn/mp3 playback/mp3 rip software/eye candy offering iTunes (the only legal freeware MP3 ripper on the planet).
Of course, open source software is still utter shit from an interface design and usability standpoint...so i do have to agree with you that Applesoft puts it to shame.
Well, this is a nice way to think of it for us Java geeks, but I don't think you're inventing anything new. The reason the Fed was invented was to blunt the changes in a natural expansion/recession wave that follows economics. There is a 25 year depression/growth cycle with minor recessions at the crosspoints...meaning that if it weren't for controlling measures like the fed to smooth out the lines we'd surely be bottoming out.
I'm no economic historian...hell, i don't even like Adam Smith...but it's important to realize that this cycle of growth is nothing new, it can be tracked as far back as the middle ages (the beginning of modern trade practices). Nothing can stop the swing, but several factors limit it in recent times...the Fed, FDIC, and all sorts of locking measures in the stock market including the releativly short trading day (things always swing down in the evening and back up a bit in the morning; i guess things are just brighter after a nice breakfast:).
Are these things dependent on each other? Well, yeah, of course they are, it's a free market economy. Without regulation there's going to be undulation according to the 25 year cycle which appears to be a human thing. Can we do anything about it? Yeah, we already are, and if they prove not to be enough we'll do something else (like provoking a big strong nation into a prick waving match in which we focus the country on our "enemies").
Anyway, free software was around long before GNU LINUX -- remember the code samples in the back of Run and Apple World? They saved as much time for us in those days as PHP and Apache do now. It's nothing new or revolutionary. It won't stop the recession -- recessions are caused by panicking humans, not friendly bits -- but it certainly does make computer usage a lot more fun.
Este commento es muy estupido. Si tu marcarias un email por muchos personas, no es posible a cambiar la lengua por todos. Él es la problema a mano. Y muchos de las palabras en estes lenguas son similar con las mismas en Ingles, por example "sex" en español es "sexo," y "Pornography" es la "pornografía."
They wouldn't work. As any rhetorician will tell you, web grammar is worse than regular written grammar due to the speed of the medium, and it's nearly impossible to discern useful messages from spam. Compare, for example, your average marketting news feed (a la PR NewsWire or Business Weekly) with your average spam newsletter...you'd be surprised how similar the two are in essential context.
Furthermore, you can't use a grammar check on "naughty" words because the context in spam would be the SAME as the context in the law journals...you'd be effectively blocking both.
Because the web is still too young. I'd say the majority of the readers of nytimes.com and even the Tech Law Journal are only semi tech literate, and asking them to integrate PGP with their mail system is way too much. If these people are into the point 'n click paradigm, sending them a message that looks like gibberish and then spouting off to them about how they need to install a third party application (or worse, use *NIX and write a script) is like not sending them the message at all. PGP is still beyond these users' abilities.
Now, a much better option might be to send the messages encrypted in HTML codes. I know, you're saying "huh" and scrunching up your nose. What I mean is, to an HTML based mail viewer, there's a difference between SEX and S>!-- --<E>!-- --<X...but to the viewer of the message, there isn't. Unless your block software renders web page messages before blocking, the second will get through looking the same as the first...this is how I encrypt my e-mail address on my website to avoid spam spiders, and so far it's worked wonders.
This isn't flamebait...it's a response directly from the core of the issue. The reason we have such immense explosions is that we are told not to fight back, the violence isn't the answer. Well, it's true...violence isn't the answer, but it's a pretty goddamn good argument if you're the one receiving it.
Now, I know the whole concept may be a little too "Ender's Game" for the/. crowd, but resistance -- any resistance, verbal or physical -- is the key to maintaining one's self esteem in the face of opression. Rosa Parks knew it when she sat down on that bus. And the Comubine kids knew it when they committed those atrocities. Towards the end of high school, I knew it. I was sick of being called a freak, of being ostracized for "acting smart" and discussing particle physics in the locker room. I developed a smart mouth. I became a wiseass. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. High school got you down? Well, the next time somebody pushes you, tell them they've got girl arms. Tell them you think they must be gay (not because you want to offend homosexuals, but because it will enflame them quicker than anything else you could say -- bullys have a slight hold on their masculinity). Run if they pursue you and you aren't man enough to fight them. Find their enemies and befriend them, use your slashdot trolling skills to cloud their thoughts and above all ally yourself with other members of the downtrodden and forgotten.
I know that doing these things is the only reason I and my friends survived high school. I still have a bitterness for the moronic behaviour of those around me who really did just want to cause somebody trouble because they were different from their preceived view of reality. And above all, you can't ever change the way you want to be because somebody else tells you to! Ignore those who tell you to "be yourself" (there's no such thing), but at the same time remember that being the person you're satisfied to be is far more important than what anybody else things; it's the only way to be truly at peace with yourself.
And finally: things get better, but they're never all right when you're different. I was a loner still in college, meeting and liking only a handful of people. At work it's the same, and my friends there are only the ones who want to be friendly and can stand different styles of speech, dress and thought. This is why it's so essential to have friends and carry them with you...if you can act how you want to act without pressure from any person, then that person is who you'll want to be around most.
Try on Shen-mue, the video game from Sega designed by Yu Suzuki. It is the first attempt I've seen by a popular and talented video game designer to create a realm that felt like real life, despite its existance within a set of CDs and a small pixel blitter. Story left me wanting for more, and made me excited even to perform such mundane tasks as going to work and petting a kitten.
There's also a game for the Sega Saturn called Nights: Into Dreams. Hard to find, but worth it; nights was the first game that really dragged you headfirst into a world of 3d and colour. The eminent designer of every good game on the NES, Shigeru Miyamoto, says he never plays video games; but when prompted to play Nights he utted the words "oh cool" . Talk about your game of kings!
I needen't remind you, I'm sure, of Myst and Seventh Hour, two games that nearly broke my head as a younger man. Granted, they're nowhere near as pleasant visually as today's games, but the appeal they made to the senses and to the mind (those chess puzzles were HARD) was very special.
Finally, anything in the vast catalogue of text adventures from Infocom. I remember playing Lurking Horror and thinking, "finally, a book that I can talk back to." Great advances have been made in the medium by fans since the release of the Z engine. Anything you find nowadays has a good chance of being brilliant.
User Friendly -- we make fun of those dumber than us, just like in second grade!
The core issue of operating systems in the 21st Century is no doubt going to be one of usability. With more and more common users entering the market and no machines shipping with instruction manuals, intuitive interfaces are incredibly important to a consumer OS. GNU Linux, for all its stability and power, has nowhere near the ease of use of Windows or MacOS. However, it's getting better -- a friend of mine hooked his mother up with a copy running off kernel 2.4 that boots quickly into GNOME and has everything organized simple as a netappliance. GNU Linux interfaces are incredibly varied and skinnable, and it won't be long until superstable windowing systems are available for free to rival Windows.
My question is this: what are you at Redmond doing to enhance the usability of your GUI in the face of these GNU Linux based net appliances and an ever improving Mac OS? And how can you support a network based application strategy like.net when local machines are more than powerful enough to perform every task that's need of them and studies show that roughly 40% of web interfaces are confusing to the average user?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, part of the idea is that nobody does...and nobody should have to. I mean, you go to the Met or the Whitney to look at paintings, right? But you never, ever consider that you'll be able to absorb them all...art is just too real, just too detailed, just too large. Online art needs higher resolution than is currently available to even approach the offline experience...which, luddites aside, is what it should do. Online exhibits are much cheaper to maintain and offer no possibility of ruination for the original work, which makes them a beautiful alternative to expensive print reproductions and art exhibits which have viewing hours and limited space. Besides, two gig goes fast...consider 600 meg of mpeg-1 video clips at 1500 kbit each, another 250 meg of 600 kbit DivX clips and about 50 meg of rm "thumbnails", and hakf of that is gone already. Now combine that with those high res images I mentioned. What you have in your hand is a lot of space, taken up mostly by your higher quality choices -- choice which, as I've mentioned, is necessary to give digitized medium a "real world" feel.
Warhol did nothing that changed the world in any way. He did "pop art," meaning he did art that people liked, not art that was expressive. I've sat through lecture after lecture on how that fucking Campbell's can changed the world, and I still don't see it. It's just a soup can, it's not absurd or profound or even interesting, and the only real beneficiaries to the work he did were himself and the Campbells Soup corporation (who, I might add, would have been fools to sanction such a work, it was free publicity and people liked it. now, if it was a parody of a campbell's soup can, nobody would have ever seen it...Kaufman would have been sued into the gutter, and good riddance). All art has two major elements: extrinsic value and intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is what's on the page, what's in the song and so on. Extrinsic value relates what's on the page and in the song to the world outside. Kaufman's work was almost entirely extrinisic, meaning that in a world without popular culture he wouldn't have been an artist. And that's precisely the argument I'm trying to make: if we want to avoid work that's stale and derivative, which we do (and these are the elements Kaufman built his career on), we can't rely on fair use of other peoples' work.
And don't bring patents into this...patents have nothing to do with art, which is by nature about consumption of materials for the sake of creation and the fight against entropy that defines human existance, digital expression aside (though the argument can be made that these consume electricity). Many an artist has used a patented device to create art, from the chainsaw to some of the more ingenious fan brushed and colouring techniques. Patent laws do not affect artists in the least -- patent law affects businesses and thinkers. The similarity between IP and copyright and patents was only noticed as a result of the internet's merger of form, function and finance. Until an abstraction of each can be made conclusively, we're in danger not of losing our artists but of losing our ability to create art with ease (and that's not really a great loss; if it wasn't for the computer I'd take my hand to the page).
Somewhere in the last two years' rush to the internet, the concept of the image got lost. It used to be easy to find lots of pictures online -- almost every site was full of high res pictures of products and so forth. Then, around the time Akamai came out, IT people realised something: images robbed bandwidth. After all, did it make sense to have a nice 64k image taking up your server's time that would be better spent rendering a page or handling a credit card transcation? Well, it might -- to those of us still adjusting to the internet-as-money-maker concept, or anybody who really lives for content. But nowadays, it's almost impossible to have a really nice gallery of images. Consider this: one high res 2.3 mpixel (1800x1600) jpeg image with low compression takes upwards of 800k with no compression and 230 with plenty of it. Shrink it down, and you can fit it under the magical 60k mark, but you lose all your res and pick up a lot of block noise. The solution, of course, is the thumbnail -- but it's not complete. Thumbnails take time and a moderate level of knowledge to generate, and they take up space. 10 truly high res graphics of the type i described above, plus their thumbnails, plus an intermediate size for the poor suckers on dailup, and you're looking at 10 meg. Consider also that many servers are still charging webspace at a 1996 rate (at least, I haven't found one yet that would accept my site's 2 gig of mpegs, jpegs and tfifs without charging me at the ultracorporate rate of $500+/month), and it just doesn't make any sense to take your not-for-profit personal page or motion media show-off site and bring it online. If you do bring it online, you're stuck either paying a lot of money (thus forcing you to accept advertisements and bastardize all your hard work or beg for money) or reducing your graphics and media to heavily compressed closed source solutions like asf or rm (notice i didn't say asx or rmi...saving art should be the right of the browser).
Hopefully, somebody out there in the hosting world will realise that the death of the VC funded dot com will require a reduction in hosting costs to survive...or the invention of clever pricing plans to allow us spacehogs that don't push much bandwidth to colocate with bandwidth eaters with no space requirements, e.g. the drudge report.
Consider this: without fair use laws for artistic works, we would have more beautiful pieces and far less derivation in the fields of art, music and multimedia.
Now, this is just speculation, and kind of hypocritical -- a trip to epmf.dasmegabyte.org will show you that my "art" benefits so much from fair use that i'm pushing its legality. However, it's something to think about. How much would we *really* suffer if we couldn't use other peoples' works in reviews, collages or academic works? I mean, shit. Most of the motion video on the internet is derivative of offline media, and many pieces of art, music and motion video borrow heavily from popular entities. And these works are usually less enjoyable than the original and offer no real insight into anything. I mean, c'mon -- Park Wars was awful, not funny and not really a great parody of anything. The "all your base" craze was mildly amusing at first and tunnelled its way into cliche in less than the time it took to play all the way through zerowing. And I don't need to remind you of all the hideous flash videos out there that have taken advantage of the Budweiser "wossop" commercial, the mastercard "priceless" adverts or the plight of metallica and dr dre as seen through the eyes of us internet "subterraneans".
It's not suprising that when I visit the monthly Saint Rose JCA Poetry Slam that all I hear is rehashes of hallmark cards and Korn lyrics. This beleif that art must be built on top of other art is totally antithetical to the concept of free expression. Poetry is about combining words in a fashion that's totally different from the way anybody else would combine them to create a window into your thoughts. Art should be about expressionism -- making images the way you see them or feel they should be seen. And motion video should be about telling a unique story from a unique point of view (or, shouts my jackoff film professor of three months, it should show the truth -- which means it should show nothing but pictures from the lives of boring people). Where's the originality in constructing the same ironic mismatch of media, the same syncronicity of images on image?
Sure, copyrights are bad and I hate them (although I will kill the guy who stole my "akira" video and repackaged it with his name). But what are we really restricted from doing? Garner's Grendel was the Beowulf legend, but it was really nothing like Beowulf...it shared no words or storyflow. That was what made it a masterpiece without pulling from the respect granted to the 800 AD original. Animal Farm was made an allegory, not a scathing work of historical fiction, because allegory succeeded in illustrating the sadness far better than the original. And one could very easily argue that a hiphop track which creates a new loop rather than borrowing from a popular song can be just as good as one that borrows heavily...listen sometime to the work of the RZA, whose work on the Ghost Dog soundtrack included very few copyrighted samples.
Copyright law is an invitation; nay, a challenge, to the artisans of the world: We've blocked off one channel to create art -- art that could easily become complacent and derivative. It's your job to make something new, rather than waste your time riding the coattails of others. An artist needs paint, sure, but she doesn't necessarily need blue paint...she might not create the Giocanda, but she could easily create Guernica.
Alright, the government knows about me. I'm hardly shaking in my boots, because the information that they can get privately is no more verbose than what they could get already by running a credit check and talking to my mom. These would be their first two courses of action if they ever suspected me of pulling anything funny. Of course, nobody would begrudge the government the ability to phone up somebody's friends, their bank or their employer in the case of something prurious -- it's this ability which helps protect us from the truly troublesome elements. So why do we have such a huge problem if they're grabbing simple info about us before hand?
Simple. We're afraid of being profiled. If the government makes a list of angry loners, most of us would be on it, especially the goatse.cx kids. The things that we prize -- free software, free speech, high technology, geeky knowlege -- are red light topics. High school shooters play D&D and video games. Terrorists support "libertarian" ideals.
So I don't feel we should attack the government's right to collect information. I feel we should attack the use of profiling of any kind. There is too much basis and therefore prejudice in law; that's why unarmed black men get shot and why goth teenagers are roped into sensitivity training. Forget Gattaca...the government doesn't need DNA to alienate us. And if we don't halt this propensity, we'll suddenly find our rights to support fringe subjects slipping out from under us.
Yes, this is true. The shitty writing is completely seperate from the Noir style. Mickey Spillane didn't write his metaphors for his cat; he wrote them for a hip audience weaned on a terse print style. Jeter's amateur approach the the genre is an insult to decent futurable sci-fi and decent detective novels simultaneously, just as insulting as "Blade Runner 2" was to Phillip K. Dick, William Gibson, and anybody born since 1943 who had a modicum of talent or taste.
But don't consider this a pan of Jeter's style. He's quite good if you like utter shit, and judging from the "Ender's Game" following around here, you do.
First, this is bullshit. The web is not repurposed content -- it's the same as radio, just coming out of different speakers. You don't consider my Sherwood receiver at home to be a different medium than the Blau in my Passat. And, in a lot of areas, you can't have an honest FM station that will reach all your prospective listeners. A good example is Vermont's WEQX (I am listening online as we speak). It's one of the last great independent commercial stations in the world, and it's one of the few stations I've ever heard that will play what the DJs want to hear. But their transmitter is not powerful...it gets drowned out by powerlines and is nearly impossible to get indoors. Hence, I listen online at weqx.com. It's terrible quality, it get congested and the ads are stupid. But it satisfies my need for independent radio.
This is the type of station that should be online -- a station whos playlist is totally different from every other station in the world, both statistically and stylistically. And, for that matter, EQX has listeners all over the country. Do the ads for Stratton Mountain and the Vermont Lottery appeal to these listeners? Hell no! That's why they supplement the cost of their online radio with print ads. The advertising is being broadcast online, sure, but it's hardly repurposed. It's not even properly targetted. Arguing that EQX's advertisers get money from all of their online listeners to Alan Yando's snappy Lotto patter is futile, they don't.
I think this is a sensible law for some radio stations -- ones with nationally appealling ads, for coca-cola or ford motors or even Fox TV. But then again, those stations don't need to be online! The big advertisers don't deal with independent stations, because they can't offer the kind of run that would be cost effective. They deal with huge faceless corporations like ClearChannel, whose content from station to station does not vary anyway. In fact, ClearChannel's DJs are all nothing more than talking heads, with no humans manning the local station mics. They won't answer your requests, they don't understand local politics or personalities and they don't visit local businesses. In essence, ClearChannel stations over the radio are already netcasts...they're nationally broadcast playlists without regional content or any real insight into the listening audience.
I suppose the only consolation I have is that, so far, EQX is still online...and I can still hear the Live Lunch at work.
Building a market on advertising, when your customers are primarily people who are too cheap to pay for your content, seems to be the stupidest idea business has ever had. If you remember back in the days of 1999 (when I broke my e-business hymen with a small web company that did amazing work and made a lot of dough before being bought by a larger dotcom), everybody was about brand building, becoming the best known name in what they did. And of course, money would miraculously follow...offer the advertisers a huge name that they were plotzing to get space on. But somewhere along the line, people decided to start watching click throughs -- which was the nail in this type of business's coffin. Free content appeals to those of us who like free stuff, a class of people who aren't interested in impulse buys or leet gizmos. And of course, by the time decent content came about (and there is a lot of it around nowadays), the bottom had fallen so far out of this advert barrel for the remaining cash to spread far enough to cover the cost of truly great sites.
E-business, however, is not the same as what we call the "dot com" model. The dot com model is content for advertising. E-business is a more robust form of catalogue and phone business, which has survived for years and years before computers could count to 257.
Now, the trick is to find a way for all these wonderful content sites to stay cohesive, to make online newspapers a boon rather than a drag on print sales. The trick is to survive the stupidity of the branded marketting boom and move into an application and content model that is condusive to magnificent content but also will pay the bills. The internet has spent the past three years selling its cow for the magic bean of advertising, but it only grew into a small cactus. It's up to us -- the internet users, internet industrialists and yes even us open software paranoids -- to find a way to make the web work. I think it's going to take a lot of sacrifice -- hosting houses are going to have to drop their costs and standards will need to be opened rather than closed. Users will need to be educated in a way that benefits the 'net, because for every user tricked by a "your browser is not optimized" bar is one more who is wary of the new economy. And methods of payment will need to be found that don't require micropayments, advertisements OR goodness-of-your heart donations.
What I'm wondering is, where is my copy of "The art of Hackers?" When will we see "Tron: two decades of glowing polystyrene?" And of course, the long awaited "True story of The Net."
What did they want?
"It looks like you're trying to push the enter key!
To enable AutoEnter at the end of paragraphs, please click through this ten minute wizard."
Actually, paintings do deteriorate due to viewing, and quite quickly. Photons bombarding the pigment cause the colours to fade like an old photograph. There are regulations as to how bright lights in a gallery can be and how many there are, as well as how many days out of a year a painting is viewable (the rest of the time it's in a dark climate controlled room). And remember, the Giocanda is only 400 years old...works from earlier times have only survived due to extreme storage facilities. The cave paintings around Cro Magnon, for example, survived because they've been in a cold fucking cave for ten thousand years. And the artifacts of Tutankhamun and Rameses II survived because they were buried in a stone coffin in one of the dryest areas in the world.
The digital age gives us great hope for preservation of everything, because we can copy sounds, images, motion and even DNA structures with perfect reproduction. But it will only be through the careful preservation of this information that future generations will be able to access it
If anything, and you can consider this a dig at DMCA if you like, it will be the number of copies of these artworks that will permit them to be preserved. Consider this: there is only one Mona Lisa -- if she fades, we can only guess at what her colour was. But there are millions of copies of Wing Commander IV. It's a relatively simple task to go through a few thousand of these, extract from each disc what data hasn't rot through, and compare it to the others. Combine that with huffman coding and CRCs and we can quickly reconstruct the original with perfection and certainty. You can't say that of the Venus DeMilo. And unlike other generations' copied mediums, we can trust the intermediary -- the cold, heartless eye of the scanner and OCR soft -- not to misspell anything or make up shit. Bemoan the need for proprietary copyrights if you like, but the digital age's perfect reproducability is the factor that will decide its permanent etching in the databases of the future.
Tell my mom. She's good at remembering useless details that nobody cares about and explaining them to anyone who listens. Plus she was born before the advent of the telephone.
I keep all my servers in the basement of my parent's house, and use my mother as the control mechanism. She is much more difficult to control than a PERL script, because she doesn't understand the concept of warning lights or switches. So I've hooked all of them up to speakers and I use mp3 files of songs she knows that correspond to warning messages. This leads to conversations like this:
"Hullo, mum? Is the server making noise?"
"Um, yes. I think."
"Is it the Barenaked Ladies."
"No...it sounds like Johnny Cash."
"Is it 'Johnny Yuma?'"
"No, that one about the car. 'One piece at a time.'"
"Okay, that means the switch is dead. You need to jab a pencil into the little grey box with the red triangle on it."
"Do you mean the one with the big sign that says 'don't touch?'"
"No, the one with the red triangle."
She's still easier to work with than BiznessOnline.com.
I'd just like to mention that i'm running the Rage Mobility 128 in my Powerbook, and kicking some major ass in Q3. It's hardly TOL, but better than some of the shit people bring to lanparties. Plus, the Mac platform has one huge benefit over PCs: when the frame rate dives, it has less effect on control.
And you buy a two button mouse if you want one, dumbass, nobody uses a trackpad for gaming! For the record, I use my apple pro mouse and mapped the apple key to jump...you can say that having my left hand do so much while my right does so little would affect my killrate, but in fact the precision and smooth action of the pro mouse has had the opposite affect. Stuff your boomslang, APM!
Not to mention that wearing a computer is not the best way to get laid, anyway.
"Dear, it's not toy, it's a very expensuve and high tech digital assistant...now go away, i'm playing Ms Pacman on MAME."
I know posting MS info on slashdot is like wearing Nikes to a WTO meeting, but i've had Apache running on my CE 2.11 device (cassiopeia E-100, heavily tricked out w/ 802.11 networking) for a while. I used it to serve pages during presentations, or did, rather, before i got my PowerBook. The Agenda is massively underpowered compared to my lil' pocket, but i suppose having linux on it greatly reduces the effects of that slow ass chip (the casio has a 133 MHz MIPS chip, hardware hackable to 166-199).
Apple has never been known to create bad software, and nobody who had used it would agree with you. Their OS, while not bulletproof (it's cooperative MT, for chrissake), is beautiful and a joy to work with. AppleWorks is a simple, easy to use suite which was always more full featured than MS' Works offering, and the recent software offerings: Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Apple DVD and especially the subtle and incredible burn/mp3 playback/mp3 rip software/eye candy offering iTunes (the only legal freeware MP3 ripper on the planet).
Of course, open source software is still utter shit from an interface design and usability standpoint...so i do have to agree with you that Applesoft puts it to shame.
Well, this is a nice way to think of it for us Java geeks, but I don't think you're inventing anything new. The reason the Fed was invented was to blunt the changes in a natural expansion/recession wave that follows economics. There is a 25 year depression/growth cycle with minor recessions at the crosspoints...meaning that if it weren't for controlling measures like the fed to smooth out the lines we'd surely be bottoming out.
:).
I'm no economic historian...hell, i don't even like Adam Smith...but it's important to realize that this cycle of growth is nothing new, it can be tracked as far back as the middle ages (the beginning of modern trade practices). Nothing can stop the swing, but several factors limit it in recent times...the Fed, FDIC, and all sorts of locking measures in the stock market including the releativly short trading day (things always swing down in the evening and back up a bit in the morning; i guess things are just brighter after a nice breakfast
Are these things dependent on each other? Well, yeah, of course they are, it's a free market economy. Without regulation there's going to be undulation according to the 25 year cycle which appears to be a human thing. Can we do anything about it? Yeah, we already are, and if they prove not to be enough we'll do something else (like provoking a big strong nation into a prick waving match in which we focus the country on our "enemies").
Anyway, free software was around long before GNU LINUX -- remember the code samples in the back of Run and Apple World? They saved as much time for us in those days as PHP and Apache do now. It's nothing new or revolutionary. It won't stop the recession -- recessions are caused by panicking humans, not friendly bits -- but it certainly does make computer usage a lot more fun.
Right. So an article about goat sex can turn into goatse.cx.
Este commento es muy estupido. Si tu marcarias un email por muchos personas, no es posible a cambiar la lengua por todos. Él es la problema a mano. Y muchos de las palabras en estes lenguas son similar con las mismas en Ingles, por example "sex" en español es "sexo," y "Pornography" es la "pornografía."
They wouldn't work. As any rhetorician will tell you, web grammar is worse than regular written grammar due to the speed of the medium, and it's nearly impossible to discern useful messages from spam. Compare, for example, your average marketting news feed (a la PR NewsWire or Business Weekly) with your average spam newsletter...you'd be surprised how similar the two are in essential context.
Furthermore, you can't use a grammar check on "naughty" words because the context in spam would be the SAME as the context in the law journals...you'd be effectively blocking both.
Because the web is still too young. I'd say the majority of the readers of nytimes.com and even the Tech Law Journal are only semi tech literate, and asking them to integrate PGP with their mail system is way too much. If these people are into the point 'n click paradigm, sending them a message that looks like gibberish and then spouting off to them about how they need to install a third party application (or worse, use *NIX and write a script) is like not sending them the message at all. PGP is still beyond these users' abilities.
Now, a much better option might be to send the messages encrypted in HTML codes. I know, you're saying "huh" and scrunching up your nose. What I mean is, to an HTML based mail viewer, there's a difference between SEX and S>!-- --<E>!-- --<X...but to the viewer of the message, there isn't. Unless your block software renders web page messages before blocking, the second will get through looking the same as the first...this is how I encrypt my e-mail address on my website to avoid spam spiders, and so far it's worked wonders.
This isn't flamebait...it's a response directly from the core of the issue. The reason we have such immense explosions is that we are told not to fight back, the violence isn't the answer. Well, it's true...violence isn't the answer, but it's a pretty goddamn good argument if you're the one receiving it.
/. crowd, but resistance -- any resistance, verbal or physical -- is the key to maintaining one's self esteem in the face of opression. Rosa Parks knew it when she sat down on that bus. And the Comubine kids knew it when they committed those atrocities. Towards the end of high school, I knew it. I was sick of being called a freak, of being ostracized for "acting smart" and discussing particle physics in the locker room. I developed a smart mouth. I became a wiseass. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. High school got you down? Well, the next time somebody pushes you, tell them they've got girl arms. Tell them you think they must be gay (not because you want to offend homosexuals, but because it will enflame them quicker than anything else you could say -- bullys have a slight hold on their masculinity). Run if they pursue you and you aren't man enough to fight them. Find their enemies and befriend them, use your slashdot trolling skills to cloud their thoughts and above all ally yourself with other members of the downtrodden and forgotten.
Now, I know the whole concept may be a little too "Ender's Game" for the
I know that doing these things is the only reason I and my friends survived high school. I still have a bitterness for the moronic behaviour of those around me who really did just want to cause somebody trouble because they were different from their preceived view of reality. And above all, you can't ever change the way you want to be because somebody else tells you to! Ignore those who tell you to "be yourself" (there's no such thing), but at the same time remember that being the person you're satisfied to be is far more important than what anybody else things; it's the only way to be truly at peace with yourself.
And finally: things get better, but they're never all right when you're different. I was a loner still in college, meeting and liking only a handful of people. At work it's the same, and my friends there are only the ones who want to be friendly and can stand different styles of speech, dress and thought. This is why it's so essential to have friends and carry them with you...if you can act how you want to act without pressure from any person, then that person is who you'll want to be around most.
Try on Shen-mue, the video game from Sega designed by Yu Suzuki. It is the first attempt I've seen by a popular and talented video game designer to create a realm that felt like real life, despite its existance within a set of CDs and a small pixel blitter. Story left me wanting for more, and made me excited even to perform such mundane tasks as going to work and petting a kitten.
There's also a game for the Sega Saturn called Nights: Into Dreams. Hard to find, but worth it; nights was the first game that really dragged you headfirst into a world of 3d and colour. The eminent designer of every good game on the NES, Shigeru Miyamoto, says he never plays video games; but when prompted to play Nights he utted the words "oh cool" . Talk about your game of kings!
I needen't remind you, I'm sure, of Myst and Seventh Hour, two games that nearly broke my head as a younger man. Granted, they're nowhere near as pleasant visually as today's games, but the appeal they made to the senses and to the mind (those chess puzzles were HARD) was very special.
Finally, anything in the vast catalogue of text adventures from Infocom. I remember playing Lurking Horror and thinking, "finally, a book that I can talk back to." Great advances have been made in the medium by fans since the release of the Z engine. Anything you find nowadays has a good chance of being brilliant.
User Friendly -- we make fun of those dumber than us, just like in second grade!
The core issue of operating systems in the 21st Century is no doubt going to be one of usability. With more and more common users entering the market and no machines shipping with instruction manuals, intuitive interfaces are incredibly important to a consumer OS. GNU Linux, for all its stability and power, has nowhere near the ease of use of Windows or MacOS. However, it's getting better -- a friend of mine hooked his mother up with a copy running off kernel 2.4 that boots quickly into GNOME and has everything organized simple as a netappliance. GNU Linux interfaces are incredibly varied and skinnable, and it won't be long until superstable windowing systems are available for free to rival Windows.
.net when local machines are more than powerful enough to perform every task that's need of them and studies show that roughly 40% of web interfaces are confusing to the average user?
My question is this: what are you at Redmond doing to enhance the usability of your GUI in the face of these GNU Linux based net appliances and an ever improving Mac OS? And how can you support a network based application strategy like