This is not ZDNet news. It is ZDNet blogs. They look very simular, and have raised arguments here before about blogs being passed off as news, and whether there is any difference given the state of journalism.
But anyway, no he isn't working for them, he just moved his blog.
Notice that the story is not a normal zdnet story, it is a zdnet blog, posted by none other than Ronald Piquepaille. And the on poster's website he admits to being a troll-wannabe, who gets stories posted just to drum up traffic for his site.
I don't really care; I figure most of the stories that get submitted to the slashdot editors come with ulterior motives. I also wouldn't be surprised if there are people who intentionally resubmit every story after a while to see how many dups make it onto the front page.
However, I thought it was interesting, and figured posting about it would give the people who do care something to get fumed up about:)
When I read this headline the light-saber ad was displaying at the top, and my mind filled with pictures of jedi ACLU lawyers battling video surveillence droids. Whhhoommm chttzzz clnk.
*waves hand* These are not the geeks you are looking for.
People, computers are not cars, they are not toasters, they are not televisions.... they are anything that you want them to be, and this is fundamental reason they are hard to use, change so often and are prone to crashing.
And yet people use them every day. If people have managed to learn how to use Mac or Windows, then it obviously isn't the users fault. I won't argue whether Linux is "ready for the desktop" - Linux is useful to many people for many tasks, and less so for others. But claiming the users are at fault isn't a valid argument.
In general the prevalent attitude that the user is a fault is wrong. Computers do not exist for their own benefit. They exist is to make tasks faster, more efficient, and easier. The job of the IT / programmers is not to administer the network or write software - it is to make people's jobs easier. If your software does not do that than it has failed to meet it's purpose. The fault may lie with poor understanding of the problem, or poor design, or poor implementation - but anyway the software has failed.
I haven't tried out Last.FM, yet. I'll have to do that when I get home - I always love finding new places to discover music.
However, I have been running out of luck with social networking type music recomendations lately, because they tend to just recomend music that I already know about from word of mouth (online and off). So I like Pandora, simply because it is different. The fact that it uses a different approach to link music means that I get exposed to different bands then I do using other avenues.
Of course, if I didn't like any of this different music then it wouldn't be very usefull. But in the last several weeks since I started using it Pandora has been decent at finding music that I might like. It isn't perfect, but I don't think any algorithm could possibly predict what a person will and wont like. It is better than chance. It is better than digging through music at the local record store, or online, and much less work:)
In time, Pandora will probably start running thin on new recommendations, as I use it more. Any of these algorithms probably has it limitations. Having several sucessfull ones is great, and very welcomed.
Basically what you are saying is that they are lying about how they choose songs. But why would they do that? If they were using social networking or grouping by genre, and it worked, why wouldn't they say so?
Furthermore I haven't seen anything that would lead me to think that they are grouping things like you claim. Try typing in a band like Ween. You won't get anything that is remotely related by genre or popular tastes at all.
One of the biggest things that I like about this site is that it does play different artists than I find with other systems that determine thier suggestions by genre or social linking (people who liked A liked B), and I have liked many of them.
I can think of a million songs with 'Mild rhythmatic syncopation' and 'Major key tonality' (just an example of the reasons it told me it was playing a song), and I would probably only like a small portion of them.
They are rating on hundreds of different factors. The fact that two songs are related by just one of those factors would not cause it to be played. It is the fact that it is related on a large number of those factors. And it isn't surprising that music within a genre share many traits with each other.
I suspect that the genre of my song (eg 'Hard rock roots' or 'punk roots' etc) is the biggest deciding factor in what it plays -- not the actual style of the song.
Again I don't see any reason to think this. I have found it rare for it to only play music within a specific genre, and to the extent that it did, the songs were all musically simular.
In many places biodiesel has been more expensive than regular deisel, until the recent jump in oil prices. In addition, there have been a couple of recent subsidies that have brought the price of biodiesel down at the pump. It wasn't too long ago when biodiesel was 2x the price per gallon, and not everyone has caught up to the fact that this has changed. Regardless any decrease in cost is still a great thing.
For biodiesel created with conventional crops the bottleneck is like you said, that there isn't enough enough aritable land on the planet to create as much biodiesel as we currently use in gasoline and diesel. Algae based biodiesel solves this problem but is significantly more expensive to produce than convientional biodiesel last time I checked. Honestly though, I haven't heard about any new research in that field since the DOE Algae program was put to an end back on Clinton's watch.
In reality there is no one solution to the problem. The solution will be a combination of an increase in biofuels, more efficient cars, more public transportation that runs off the grid, and even then transportation will likely be more expensive than we have become occustomed to transportation.
I looked into it, and I guess it is pretty regional. Started in texas and grew from there mainly into small to medium markets that weren't already dominated by other companies. Doesn't exist at all in california or the east coast. The distribution of F.Y.E. stores is almost the exact opposite of the Hastings map.
Interesting, I always just assumed Hastings was one of the major companies.
Maybe it is a regional thing, but Hastings is by far the most popular brick-and-mortar music store among all the people I know. Best Buy and Circuit city both have a smaller selection and higher prices than Hastings. Same with Sam Goody, although I can understand it getting a spot, since teens who live at the mall usually shop there. I can also see Walmart at the top spot, and know a few people who buy music there. FYE must also be a regional thing because I have never heard of it.
That's not the part I am talking about. Read the second line in the license summary. Commercial use is allowed if you are sampling the sound, to create something new and creative (as is traditionally done with sampling in music). However distributing the sound in it's entirety is only allowed for non-commercial purposes. When using the sounds in an application, you likely won't be remixing them, you will use them as is. If the author of the application makes money from it (regardless of whether it is open source, consider Ximian) then that is commercial use, which is not allowed by the license.
So open source projects would not be allowed to make money off of their projects if they were using sounds under this license, and likewise, no-one else could take the project and make money off of it, without stripping out the sounds, both of which are allowed by the GPL.
Of course, you are absolutely right in saying that they could always ask the authors to relicense the files under different terms, and there is a good chance that they will agree. I was just trying to clarify what the license said as it is written.
I am pretty sure that legal compatibility isn't an issue. Since you are only packaging the sounds with the software, and not merging them into the source of the application, they are considered separate works distributed together, and not a single derivative work. While the files do add to the functionality of the program, they are really no different from config files or scripts that modify the behavior of the program. As long as the modification is done outside the source code, then it isn't considered a derivative work. The GPL does not prevent you from bundling works. It is completely legal.
However, the non-commercial use clause is annoying and could cause practical difficulties for open source projects. The GPL expressly allows for the software for commercial purposes, how ever the CC Sampling Plus license doesn't. Therefore, a person who chose to use the package for commercial purposes couldn't use the sound files. It would be the responsibility of the project to inform their users that different parts of the project are under different licenses, and the responsibility of the users to follow them. This would be a major pain and would not be in the spirit of Free Software (similar to all the icon-set licensing arguments that have come up lately). I would avoid using files under this license in Free Software projects for that reason.
The OS X version of Quake 3 has a bug on some systems where it will crash if you are shot just right. It shows up very often when you are shot in the face with a plasma gun, since there is such a large number/dispersion of plasma balls.
Anyway, they have stopped maintaining that software (it was just a bonus port anyway - the official release is for system 9), and the official bug fix is to duck:)
Consumer Reports does do a good job of being objective and maintaining distance from potential conflicts of interest that could add bias their opinions. I wouldn't buy a car without checking their guide (among others). However, when they try to rate anything even barely outside thier vehicle / household appliance focus, the report is next to useless. They just don't know enough about the subject to pick good criteria for comparison, and they don't have a large enough number of reader interested in the review to justify a thorough comparison. So they end up with a small number of products, and odd assumptions about what they think is important about the product.
Futhermore, the correct answer to the Linux vs Windows question is it depends on the situation. There are far to many use cases to compare. There are many instances where we use windows at work and it is the most cost effective thing to do because we have software that only runs on windows. There is no general purpose study that you can do determine if the long term costs of migrating to linux will be less expensive in the long run, because the migration process is different for every company.
Software is indeed patentable. This was decided in the Diamond v. Diehr case over 20 years ago. Thousands of software patents have been granted since then, and the requirements have gotten weaker over that time. Whether they ought to be allowed is very debatable, but the fact of the law isn't.
Secondly, copyright only applies to a specific work. If your work is not a direct modification of the other work then you are not infringing upon copyright. This happens all the time. WINE does not violate Windows copyright. Open Office does not violate Office's copyright. The is a ton of legal precedent that reverse engineering is legal.
Why is misinformation like this constantly modded this up? I have never seen a group of people who knew so little about a subject that they care so much about as in the slashdot copyright discussions.
Posting anyonymously doesn't work anyway - they check your IP. And slashdot is pretty good at catching open relays as well. So the only garenteed way to be able to post and moderate in the same thread is to post from a computer that really has a different IP and which doesn't have your slashdot account stored in a cookie.
In music you have copyright on a particular recording of a song, which is what you get sued for infringing upon when filesharing. In addition you have copyright on the song itself - the lyrics, melody, composition, etc. If you look at the liner notes for a CD you will see something like "Copyright CrooksR'US Records. All rights reserved". This is the copyright notice for the recording. You often see names listed by each song, or a note to the effect of "All songs written by Your Favorite Band". This is attributing who wrote the song. This person (people) get royalties on all performances (including bar cover-bands), and recordings of the song, not just this specific recording.
This would clearly be infringing on the second copyright (on the song), but not the first (on the recording).
That story is cool, but it does not apply to all cases of predatory pricing. It only worked because the cartel was charging different prices in different countries. In this age, the only situations where that happens it is backed by law preventing someone like Dow from doing what he did.
When a large company prices below the market value (be it in the world market or a walled off local market), and they have deep enough pockets to take a small loss, then there is nothing that the small companies can do about it. They can't buy up the product and resell it, as it will still be more expensive than the original. Predatory pricing does exist, and a single anicdote does not dispel that fact.
This was horribly written article. Even after reading the whole thing I'm not entirely sure what the proposal is. Although from what I can tell, the submitter got it backwards. The US scientists want to get rid of the leap seconds, not add new ones.
I personally don't see why there is a need to change any of the existing standards - especially the one used by everyday people. The best thing about standards, is that there are so many to choose from. If there was ever a feild where that statement was true, it is the precise time-keeping industry. GPS time is slightly different from UTC time which is different from TAI time, and UT0 and UT1 and Sidereal Time. There are so many different ways to deal with time, and adding a new and improved method never obsoletes the old ones, it just adds yet another standard to the list of time standards that you will have to convert between.
who didn't shower enough and lichen started growing on his scalp. It like totally took over his brain. Now he has to deal with the ethical dilemas of being sued for trespassing on a rock for thousands of years even though only part of him is guilty.
Only a total newbie would trust aluminum foil. Which is why us true paranoids always wear full copper-mesh body-suits. Faraday-cage appearal - the chain-mail for a new generation.
AFAIK, the MIR mold was only growing inside the space station. In other words it had a nice atmospherically controlled environment practically identical to the environment that it evolved in. The only oddity that it had to deal with was lack of gravity.
This is much different as the lichen had to survive the vacuum of space, including direct solar radiation and dramatic temperature variations that come with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I had never really understood who the target market for Aperture was, or what they would be doing with it that would make it worth $500. Now I do.
This is not ZDNet news. It is ZDNet blogs. They look very simular, and have raised arguments here before about blogs being passed off as news, and whether there is any difference given the state of journalism.
But anyway, no he isn't working for them, he just moved his blog.
Notice that the story is not a normal zdnet story, it is a zdnet blog, posted by none other than Ronald Piquepaille. And the on poster's website he admits to being a troll-wannabe, who gets stories posted just to drum up traffic for his site.
:)
I don't really care; I figure most of the stories that get submitted to the slashdot editors come with ulterior motives. I also wouldn't be surprised if there are people who intentionally resubmit every story after a while to see how many dups make it onto the front page.
However, I thought it was interesting, and figured posting about it would give the people who do care something to get fumed up about
When I read this headline the light-saber ad was displaying at the top, and my mind filled with pictures of jedi ACLU lawyers battling video surveillence droids. Whhhoommm chttzzz clnk.
*waves hand* These are not the geeks you are looking for.
I had picked one up in the shop before I remembered that I live on my own and I've got no-one to shoot them at!
This, my friend, is why god invented cats.
People, computers are not cars, they are not toasters, they are not televisions.... they are anything that you want them to be, and this is fundamental reason they are hard to use, change so often and are prone to crashing.
And yet people use them every day. If people have managed to learn how to use Mac or Windows, then it obviously isn't the users fault. I won't argue whether Linux is "ready for the desktop" - Linux is useful to many people for many tasks, and less so for others. But claiming the users are at fault isn't a valid argument.
In general the prevalent attitude that the user is a fault is wrong. Computers do not exist for their own benefit. They exist is to make tasks faster, more efficient, and easier. The job of the IT / programmers is not to administer the network or write software - it is to make people's jobs easier. If your software does not do that than it has failed to meet it's purpose. The fault may lie with poor understanding of the problem, or poor design, or poor implementation - but anyway the software has failed.
I haven't tried out Last.FM, yet. I'll have to do that when I get home - I always love finding new places to discover music.
:)
However, I have been running out of luck with social networking type music recomendations lately, because they tend to just recomend music that I already know about from word of mouth (online and off). So I like Pandora, simply because it is different. The fact that it uses a different approach to link music means that I get exposed to different bands then I do using other avenues.
Of course, if I didn't like any of this different music then it wouldn't be very usefull. But in the last several weeks since I started using it Pandora has been decent at finding music that I might like. It isn't perfect, but I don't think any algorithm could possibly predict what a person will and wont like. It is better than chance. It is better than digging through music at the local record store, or online, and much less work
In time, Pandora will probably start running thin on new recommendations, as I use it more. Any of these algorithms probably has it limitations. Having several sucessfull ones is great, and very welcomed.
Basically what you are saying is that they are lying about how they choose songs. But why would they do that? If they were using social networking or grouping by genre, and it worked, why wouldn't they say so?
Furthermore I haven't seen anything that would lead me to think that they are grouping things like you claim. Try typing in a band like Ween. You won't get anything that is remotely related by genre or popular tastes at all.
One of the biggest things that I like about this site is that it does play different artists than I find with other systems that determine thier suggestions by genre or social linking (people who liked A liked B), and I have liked many of them.
I can think of a million songs with 'Mild rhythmatic syncopation' and 'Major key tonality' (just an example of the reasons it told me it was playing a song), and I would probably only like a small portion of them.
They are rating on hundreds of different factors. The fact that two songs are related by just one of those factors would not cause it to be played. It is the fact that it is related on a large number of those factors. And it isn't surprising that music within a genre share many traits with each other.
I suspect that the genre of my song (eg 'Hard rock roots' or 'punk roots' etc) is the biggest deciding factor in what it plays -- not the actual style of the song.
Again I don't see any reason to think this. I have found it rare for it to only play music within a specific genre, and to the extent that it did, the songs were all musically simular.
In many places biodiesel has been more expensive than regular deisel, until the recent jump in oil prices. In addition, there have been a couple of recent subsidies that have brought the price of biodiesel down at the pump. It wasn't too long ago when biodiesel was 2x the price per gallon, and not everyone has caught up to the fact that this has changed. Regardless any decrease in cost is still a great thing.
For biodiesel created with conventional crops the bottleneck is like you said, that there isn't enough enough aritable land on the planet to create as much biodiesel as we currently use in gasoline and diesel. Algae based biodiesel solves this problem but is significantly more expensive to produce than convientional biodiesel last time I checked. Honestly though, I haven't heard about any new research in that field since the DOE Algae program was put to an end back on Clinton's watch.
In reality there is no one solution to the problem. The solution will be a combination of an increase in biofuels, more efficient cars, more public transportation that runs off the grid, and even then transportation will likely be more expensive than we have become occustomed to transportation.
I looked into it, and I guess it is pretty regional. Started in texas and grew from there mainly into small to medium markets that weren't already dominated by other companies. Doesn't exist at all in california or the east coast. The distribution of F.Y.E. stores is almost the exact opposite of the Hastings map.
Interesting, I always just assumed Hastings was one of the major companies.
Maybe it is a regional thing, but Hastings is by far the most popular brick-and-mortar music store among all the people I know. Best Buy and Circuit city both have a smaller selection and higher prices than Hastings. Same with Sam Goody, although I can understand it getting a spot, since teens who live at the mall usually shop there. I can also see Walmart at the top spot, and know a few people who buy music there. FYE must also be a regional thing because I have never heard of it.
That's not the part I am talking about. Read the second line in the license summary. Commercial use is allowed if you are sampling the sound, to create something new and creative (as is traditionally done with sampling in music). However distributing the sound in it's entirety is only allowed for non-commercial purposes. When using the sounds in an application, you likely won't be remixing them, you will use them as is. If the author of the application makes money from it (regardless of whether it is open source, consider Ximian) then that is commercial use, which is not allowed by the license.
So open source projects would not be allowed to make money off of their projects if they were using sounds under this license, and likewise, no-one else could take the project and make money off of it, without stripping out the sounds, both of which are allowed by the GPL.
Of course, you are absolutely right in saying that they could always ask the authors to relicense the files under different terms, and there is a good chance that they will agree. I was just trying to clarify what the license said as it is written.
I am pretty sure that legal compatibility isn't an issue. Since you are only packaging the sounds with the software, and not merging them into the source of the application, they are considered separate works distributed together, and not a single derivative work. While the files do add to the functionality of the program, they are really no different from config files or scripts that modify the behavior of the program. As long as the modification is done outside the source code, then it isn't considered a derivative work. The GPL does not prevent you from bundling works. It is completely legal.
However, the non-commercial use clause is annoying and could cause practical difficulties for open source projects. The GPL expressly allows for the software for commercial purposes, how ever the CC Sampling Plus license doesn't. Therefore, a person who chose to use the package for commercial purposes couldn't use the sound files. It would be the responsibility of the project to inform their users that different parts of the project are under different licenses, and the responsibility of the users to follow them. This would be a major pain and would not be in the spirit of Free Software (similar to all the icon-set licensing arguments that have come up lately). I would avoid using files under this license in Free Software projects for that reason.
The OS X version of Quake 3 has a bug on some systems where it will crash if you are shot just right. It shows up very often when you are shot in the face with a plasma gun, since there is such a large number/dispersion of plasma balls.
:)
Anyway, they have stopped maintaining that software (it was just a bonus port anyway - the official release is for system 9), and the official bug fix is to duck
Consumer Reports does do a good job of being objective and maintaining distance from potential conflicts of interest that could add bias their opinions. I wouldn't buy a car without checking their guide (among others). However, when they try to rate anything even barely outside thier vehicle / household appliance focus, the report is next to useless. They just don't know enough about the subject to pick good criteria for comparison, and they don't have a large enough number of reader interested in the review to justify a thorough comparison. So they end up with a small number of products, and odd assumptions about what they think is important about the product.
Futhermore, the correct answer to the Linux vs Windows question is it depends on the situation. There are far to many use cases to compare. There are many instances where we use windows at work and it is the most cost effective thing to do because we have software that only runs on windows. There is no general purpose study that you can do determine if the long term costs of migrating to linux will be less expensive in the long run, because the migration process is different for every company.
Software is indeed patentable. This was decided in the Diamond v. Diehr case over 20 years ago. Thousands of software patents have been granted since then, and the requirements have gotten weaker over that time. Whether they ought to be allowed is very debatable, but the fact of the law isn't.
Secondly, copyright only applies to a specific work. If your work is not a direct modification of the other work then you are not infringing upon copyright. This happens all the time. WINE does not violate Windows copyright. Open Office does not violate Office's copyright. The is a ton of legal precedent that reverse engineering is legal.
Why is misinformation like this constantly modded this up? I have never seen a group of people who knew so little about a subject that they care so much about as in the slashdot copyright discussions.
I have heard that some kids as stanford have created this thing called google that lets you search the internet for information.
Posting anyonymously doesn't work anyway - they check your IP. And slashdot is pretty good at catching open relays as well. So the only garenteed way to be able to post and moderate in the same thread is to post from a computer that really has a different IP and which doesn't have your slashdot account stored in a cookie.
In music you have copyright on a particular recording of a song, which is what you get sued for infringing upon when filesharing. In addition you have copyright on the song itself - the lyrics, melody, composition, etc. If you look at the liner notes for a CD you will see something like "Copyright CrooksR'US Records. All rights reserved". This is the copyright notice for the recording. You often see names listed by each song, or a note to the effect of "All songs written by Your Favorite Band". This is attributing who wrote the song. This person (people) get royalties on all performances (including bar cover-bands), and recordings of the song, not just this specific recording.
This would clearly be infringing on the second copyright (on the song), but not the first (on the recording).
That story is cool, but it does not apply to all cases of predatory pricing. It only worked because the cartel was charging different prices in different countries. In this age, the only situations where that happens it is backed by law preventing someone like Dow from doing what he did.
When a large company prices below the market value (be it in the world market or a walled off local market), and they have deep enough pockets to take a small loss, then there is nothing that the small companies can do about it. They can't buy up the product and resell it, as it will still be more expensive than the original. Predatory pricing does exist, and a single anicdote does not dispel that fact.
This was horribly written article. Even after reading the whole thing I'm not entirely sure what the proposal is. Although from what I can tell, the submitter got it backwards. The US scientists want to get rid of the leap seconds, not add new ones.
I personally don't see why there is a need to change any of the existing standards - especially the one used by everyday people. The best thing about standards, is that there are so many to choose from. If there was ever a feild where that statement was true, it is the precise time-keeping industry. GPS time is slightly different from UTC time which is different from TAI time, and UT0 and UT1 and Sidereal Time. There are so many different ways to deal with time, and adding a new and improved method never obsoletes the old ones, it just adds yet another standard to the list of time standards that you will have to convert between.
who didn't shower enough and lichen started growing on his scalp. It like totally took over his brain. Now he has to deal with the ethical dilemas of being sued for trespassing on a rock for thousands of years even though only part of him is guilty.
I don't want to know what kind of flute that goat-man is playing.
Only a total newbie would trust aluminum foil. Which is why us true paranoids always wear full copper-mesh body-suits. Faraday-cage appearal - the chain-mail for a new generation.
AFAIK, the MIR mold was only growing inside the space station. In other words it had a nice atmospherically controlled environment practically identical to the environment that it evolved in. The only oddity that it had to deal with was lack of gravity.
This is much different as the lichen had to survive the vacuum of space, including direct solar radiation and dramatic temperature variations that come with it.