"Stoners of the World Unite!"
on
New Cyberlaws
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· Score: 1
I can see it now... enraged potheads filling the streets, intent on marching on Congress to overthrow the government.. and then saying "fuck it", sitting down and having a cone.
At the end of the day, the most noticeable effect of the Stoners' Uprising would be a shortage of snack foods from vending machines.
Re:Canada less clueless?
on
New Cyberlaws
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· Score: 1
Yes, but at least in Canada you get things like health care and public transport for your tax money, rather than it all going on stealth bombers and corporate welfare.
The problem with MacOS is that other than that, it sucks. The system itself was designed for use on tiny microcomputers, and retrofitted into a workstation role. There is no command line and no scriptability. The tangle of APIs and Managers grows more impenetrably dense by the day. Not to mention that the system is unstable (no memory protection, for example), inefficient and so different from everything else to make programming a nightmare.
From an end-user point of view, it's very pretty, and better for most things than Windows 95. Look any deeper and you see its rotten guts.
(I own a Mac and use MacOS, mostly for running various media applications. I've tried programming under it, and after UNIX, it's a pain, even with tools like CodeWarrior.)
Not to mention NeWS. Another client/server windowing system from the late 80s/early 90s. Only NeWS did things The Right Way. Rather than simply throwing dumb requests and responses back and forth, a client application could send Display PostScript code, which would live in the server and handle UI aspects.
Of course, back in those dark, unenlightened days, Sun (the owners) either demanded exorbitant licencing fees for the technology or just refused to licence it, thinking that being the only ones with NeWS gave them an advantage. And so, sadly, NeWS died.
The inventors of NeWS went on to create another client/server system, albeit one with a different scope. We know it as Java.
...or, alternately, it could be used to create highly selective viri; ones which are highly contagious, hard to detect, and harmless, except to a select group (an ethnic group), or when triggered by a combination of stimuli (chemicals, temperature, or even a trace quantity of a trigger drug). And if it can, it will.
It's human nature. Give mankind railways and assembly-line technology, and you eventually get Auschwitz. The next Holocaust may well be waged with custom-designed viruses.
When he made said prediction, his argument was that the lack of central control would be the Internet's downfall, and that it would be replaced by a hierarchical system with a well-defined control structure.
Bob Metcalfe seems to be a control freak, unable to imagine any enterprise being successful without a centralised point of control.
One wonders whether, had he not lived in an earlier age, he'd have been predicting the collapse of capitalism, and the inherent supremacy of Soviet-style socialism, by virtue of its centrally planned command economy.
...except when the screen is 160x160 pixels, which is not big enough to hold a long sentence.
I tried writing long pieces on my Pilot, and found it to be more difficult and challenging than writing on something with a larger screen (such as vi on anything VT100-sized). The lack of context means that you have to mentally keep track of what you've written more than a few lines ago, otherwise you end up paging back and forth a lot, as well as omitting and/or repeating things.
Come to think of it, how do we know that SETI@Home deals with radiotelescope data at all? It could be anything. For all we know, SETI@Home contributors could unwittingly be nodes in a vast NSA cryptanalysis machine.
Universal is one of the more reactionary intellectual-property corporations. They essentially declared war on MP3, opposing it at every turn, and banning all artists signed to them from releasing MP3s. (Since Universal (which also owns PolyGram) controls 35% of the music market, this is not without consequence.)
Their demands for total control of content and legalistic sabre-rattling are completely in character.
If Adobe want to join the open source movement, the obvious places to start would be infrastructure code; technologies, languages, libraries. And the obvious first target in Adobe's case would be PostScript, or parts thereof.
Think about it; if they released a basic Display PostScript implementation (or the code necessary to immediately integrate Ghostscript into XFree86), X users on Linux (and the BSDs) would immediately have access to Display PostScript. The DPS imaging model, being free, would become part of the environment, whose existence could be assumed by any developer. This would ensure the success of Adobe's model of imaging on X, and if Adobe did it first, there'd be less incentive for OSS developers to get involved in rival companies' models.
And if an (open-source) PostScript-based system becomes the de facto standard, that would give Adobe an advantage in porting their applications, which presumably share the same philosophy more closely.
If a general-purpose PostScript library (or set of libraries, for the imaging model, the language, and so forth) were released, perhaps under a similar licence to Netscape's JavaScript, it would definitely find a home in many projects.
Adobe would stand to lose very little; PostScript itself is a fairly old technology, and while coding an implementation is laborious (due to its size), it is not exactly secret-weapon material.
The standards game is not about intellectual property, but about memes; about getting your memes into the ideosphere, and helping them spread as far and wide as possible. Open-source technologies make far more fecund memes than equivalent proprietary, or semi-proprietary, ones; distibutable, usable code helps them spread like wildfire. And an open-source PostScript kit would make PostScript a killer meme, and quite probably the standard in its fields. Which would be good news for PostScript and good news for Adobe's related technologies.
Strategies have a funny way of mutating in ways their originators never intended. Take, for example, frequent-flyer plans (to use an oft-cited example). Originally one airline started one to get more customers, and then others followed suit. Now frequent customers are getting a lot of free flights, which is costing the airlines a fortune. And the genie is out of the bottle; any airline which axes such a programme will be committing market suicide.
Even if Apple's open-source move may be merely a temporary strategy against Microsoft, it may end up rewriting the rules, leading to a state of affairs where standards have to be open-source to be accepted. (Which would be a Good Thing, of course.)
Eventually, hopefully every common protocol, file format and standard will be open source.
Sounds reminiscent of Dogs In Space (an Australian indie film from the 80s).
On occasion I've thought that it'd be cool to build a huge pyramid of TVs somewhere, all wired up to show videos (news, camera footage, porn, cartoons, anything), and then set fire to it, all in the name of Art.
Because you can do anything in the name of Art amd get away with it.
On my home Linux box I use olvwm as well... it's a pretty nice WM. Then again, OpenLook is a pretty nice GUI. (The rounded buttons and pushpins look tres stylish.)
One thing I found annoying about olvwm: the way it clears the X selection whenever I raise a window.
My laptop runs Enlightenment though. (It also has more RAM than my desktop Linux box.)
As opposed to the current situation, where most of the markets for music, literature and film belong to a handful of megacorporations more concerned with exploiting tried-and-tested formulae than with innovating.
This is not a way of buying a novel, piece of music, &c., but a way of sponsoring a favourite artist. Centuries ago, artists had aristocratic patrons who would underwrite their living expenses so that they may produce art. Why not a similar, only more distributed, system, in which large numbers of fans each contribute a small amount to sponsoring an artist?
I don't know about you, but I'd be happy to sponsor my favourite musicians/authors/artists, regardless of whether others would get a free ride. It's not about an exchange of goods, it's about a relationship.
"MP3 sites...unlicenced music will be closed down"
on
SDMI as Dead As DivX
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· Score: 1
Sounds very ominous... what does he mean by "licenced"? Presumably "cryptographically signed as licenced by a means controlled by the RIAA".
I.e., if you're an independent artist and want to put MP3s on the web, you either tithe to the RIAA and Big 5 and get your MP3s signed (for a fee), or you are branded as a pirate, and your site is automatically shut down.
As a creator and consumer of non-label music, this worries me.
Will it run old Amiga applications seamlessly? Will the API be compatible with AmigaOS? Does it have any other specifically Amiga-ish features?
To me it looks like someone bought the Amiga marque and just decided to use it as an asset to get ahead in the OS market. Which sounds about as genuine as the "Commodore 64" PC (a Wintel box bundled with a C64 emulator and badged with a Commodore logo licensed from whoever owns it).
Here in Australia, the old, unencrypted analogue cellular network is being shut down at the end of the year; for the past few years, digital (GSM) phones have been promoted pretty much exclusively, with very competitive deals. (You can get a $10/month contract, with a free (albeit low-end) handset from any carrier.) Plus, here you don't pay for incoming calls, so everybody and their dog has a mobile.
We may have idiotic politicians passing cretinous censorship laws and killing the local Internet industry, but at least we get cheap, relatively secure digital mobile service...:-/
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I can see it now... enraged potheads filling the streets, intent on marching on Congress to overthrow the government.. and then saying "fuck it", sitting down and having a cone.
At the end of the day, the most noticeable effect of the Stoners' Uprising would be a shortage of snack foods from vending machines.
Yes, but at least in Canada you get things like health care and public transport for your tax money, rather than it all going on stealth bombers and corporate welfare.
Have you ever programmed in PostScript? It's a remarkably elegant language.
Someone moderate the post one level above this one up... the author of it speaks sooth.
You could always get some Weight Gain 2000...
The problem with MacOS is that other than that, it sucks. The system itself was designed for use on tiny microcomputers, and retrofitted into a workstation role. There is no command line and no scriptability. The tangle of APIs and Managers grows more impenetrably dense by the day. Not to mention that the system is unstable (no memory protection, for example), inefficient and so different from everything else to make programming a nightmare.
From an end-user point of view, it's very pretty, and better for most things than Windows 95. Look any deeper and you see its rotten guts.
(I own a Mac and use MacOS, mostly for running various media applications. I've tried programming under it, and after UNIX, it's a pain, even with tools like CodeWarrior.)
Not to mention NeWS. Another client/server windowing system from the late 80s/early 90s. Only NeWS did things The Right Way. Rather than simply throwing dumb requests and responses back and forth, a client application could send Display PostScript code, which would live in the server and handle UI aspects.
Of course, back in those dark, unenlightened days, Sun (the owners) either demanded exorbitant licencing fees for the technology or just refused to licence it, thinking that being the only ones with NeWS gave them an advantage. And so, sadly, NeWS died.
The inventors of NeWS went on to create another client/server system, albeit one with a different scope. We know it as Java.
...or, alternately, it could be used to create highly selective viri; ones which are highly contagious, hard to detect, and harmless, except to a select group (an ethnic group), or when triggered by a combination of stimuli (chemicals, temperature, or even a trace quantity of a trigger drug). And if it can, it will.
It's human nature. Give mankind railways and assembly-line technology, and you eventually get Auschwitz. The next Holocaust may well be waged with custom-designed viruses.
When he made said prediction, his argument was that the lack of central control would be the Internet's downfall, and that it would be replaced by a hierarchical system with a well-defined control structure.
Bob Metcalfe seems to be a control freak, unable to imagine any enterprise being successful without a centralised point of control.
One wonders whether, had he not lived in an earlier age, he'd have been predicting the collapse of capitalism, and the inherent supremacy of Soviet-style socialism, by virtue of its centrally planned command economy.
...except when the screen is 160x160 pixels, which is not big enough to hold a long sentence.
I tried writing long pieces on my Pilot, and found it to be more difficult and challenging than writing on something with a larger screen (such as vi on anything VT100-sized). The lack of context means that you have to mentally keep track of what you've written more than a few lines ago, otherwise you end up paging back and forth a lot, as well as omitting and/or repeating things.
Come to think of it, how do we know that SETI@Home deals with radiotelescope data at all? It could be anything. For all we know, SETI@Home contributors could unwittingly be nodes in a vast NSA cryptanalysis machine.
Universal is one of the more reactionary intellectual-property corporations. They essentially declared war on MP3, opposing it at every turn, and banning all artists signed to them from releasing MP3s. (Since Universal (which also owns PolyGram) controls 35% of the music market, this is not without consequence.)
Their demands for total control of content and legalistic sabre-rattling are completely in character.
If Adobe want to join the open source movement, the obvious places to start would be infrastructure code; technologies, languages, libraries. And the obvious first target in Adobe's case would be PostScript, or parts thereof.
Think about it; if they released a basic Display PostScript implementation (or the code necessary to immediately integrate Ghostscript into XFree86), X users on Linux (and the BSDs) would immediately have access to Display PostScript. The DPS imaging model, being free, would become part of the environment, whose existence could be assumed by any developer. This would ensure the success of Adobe's model of imaging on X, and if Adobe did it first, there'd be less incentive for OSS developers to get involved in rival companies' models.
And if an (open-source) PostScript-based system becomes the de facto standard, that would give Adobe an advantage in porting their applications, which presumably share the same philosophy more closely.
If a general-purpose PostScript library (or set of libraries, for the imaging model, the language, and so forth) were released, perhaps under a similar licence to Netscape's JavaScript, it would definitely find a home in many projects.
Adobe would stand to lose very little; PostScript itself is a fairly old technology, and while coding an implementation is laborious (due to its size), it is not exactly secret-weapon material.
The standards game is not about intellectual property, but about memes; about getting your memes into the ideosphere, and helping them spread as far and wide as possible. Open-source technologies make far more fecund memes than equivalent proprietary, or semi-proprietary, ones; distibutable, usable code helps them spread like wildfire. And an open-source PostScript kit would make PostScript a killer meme, and quite probably the standard in its fields. Which would be good news for PostScript and good news for Adobe's related technologies.
Have a look at RFC1312. It provides decentralised instant messaging using user@host addressing.
Which is good for multiuser UNIX machines; for dialups it could be extended to use a directory server and/or redirector (akin to a mail server).
It's a pity 1312 wasn't more widely adopted.
It's not really Tron unless the graphics were done on a Super Foonly.
(see the Jargon File.)
Strategies have a funny way of mutating in ways their originators never intended. Take, for example, frequent-flyer plans (to use an oft-cited example). Originally one airline started one to get more customers, and then others followed suit. Now frequent customers are getting a lot of free flights, which is costing the airlines a fortune. And the genie is out of the bottle; any airline which axes such a programme will be committing market suicide.
Even if Apple's open-source move may be merely a temporary strategy against Microsoft, it may end up rewriting the rules, leading to a state of affairs where standards have to be open-source to be accepted. (Which would be a Good Thing, of course.)
Eventually, hopefully every common protocol, file format and standard will be open source.
Wait for the spams you'll get with this. Full-length infomercials, and porn segments with strategically placed URL banners. Aaiiee!
Sounds reminiscent of Dogs In Space (an Australian indie film from the 80s).
On occasion I've thought that it'd be cool to build a huge pyramid of TVs somewhere, all wired up to show videos (news, camera footage, porn, cartoons, anything), and then set fire to it, all in the name of Art.
Because you can do anything in the name of Art amd get away with it.
On my home Linux box I use olvwm as well... it's a pretty nice WM. Then again, OpenLook is a pretty nice GUI. (The rounded buttons and pushpins look tres stylish.)
One thing I found annoying about olvwm: the way it clears the X selection whenever I raise a window.
My laptop runs Enlightenment though. (It also has more RAM than my desktop Linux box.)
The Vector? The Tensor? The Eigenvalue?
As opposed to the current situation, where most of the markets for music, literature and film belong to a handful of megacorporations more concerned with exploiting tried-and-tested formulae than with innovating.
This is not a way of buying a novel, piece of music, &c., but a way of sponsoring a favourite artist. Centuries ago, artists had aristocratic patrons who would underwrite their living expenses so that they may produce art. Why not a similar, only more distributed, system, in which large numbers of fans each contribute a small amount to sponsoring an artist?
I don't know about you, but I'd be happy to sponsor my favourite musicians/authors/artists, regardless of whether others would get a free ride. It's not about an exchange of goods, it's about a relationship.
Sounds very ominous... what does he mean by "licenced"? Presumably "cryptographically signed as licenced by a means controlled by the RIAA".
I.e., if you're an independent artist and want to put MP3s on the web, you either tithe to the RIAA and Big 5 and get your MP3s signed (for a fee), or you are branded as a pirate, and your site is automatically shut down.
As a creator and consumer of non-label music, this worries me.
Will it run old Amiga applications seamlessly? Will the API be compatible with AmigaOS? Does it have any other specifically Amiga-ish features?
To me it looks like someone bought the Amiga marque and just decided to use it as an asset to get ahead in the OS market. Which sounds about as genuine as the "Commodore 64" PC (a Wintel box bundled with a C64 emulator and badged with a Commodore logo licensed from whoever owns it).
Here in Australia, the old, unencrypted analogue cellular network is being shut down at the end of the year; for the past few years, digital (GSM) phones have been promoted pretty much exclusively, with very competitive deals. (You can get a $10/month contract, with a free (albeit low-end) handset from any carrier.) Plus, here you don't pay for incoming calls, so everybody and their dog has a mobile.
:-/
We may have idiotic politicians passing cretinous censorship laws and killing the local Internet industry, but at least we get cheap, relatively secure digital mobile service...