why do I feel the urge, more than anything at this moment, to cry just the tiniest bit for each of us, and for the rest of the populace not yet hip to this development.
The codification of laws was a great advance for humankind.
The codification of of humankind offers no such benefit.
This is just preposterous. I'm sure the post is well intentioned, and I don't mean to flame, but the "consolidation for quality purposes" you allude to above is precisely what most people on/. are (rightly) objecting to in the case of the Operating System market. That is, one company has basically grabbed the lion's share of the market and is now trying to dictate what is and isn't an OS component. (E.g., the browser is integral to the OS; [one court case later:] oops, no, we can separate those code bases after all.)
If you think that companies like News Corp and TimeWarner (AOL must be salivating too) would kill for the chance to be a monopolistic provider of news to the country/world's population, think again. The result of such a situation would not be raising of the TV quality bar, but a drastic lowering of it.
Remember, monopoly (or even oligopoly) does not lead to heightened quality, higher standards, or any sort of remotely positive results when diversity is a key concern -- EVER. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Lots of interesting answers to the questions you raise.
First you ask why people waste time trying to argue against trademarking of various terms. Well, some people (especially those who frequent this site) tend to think that the patenting and/or trademarking of such terms is a ridiculous concept ab inicio. (Sorry if I'm blurring the objection to patents/copyrights with trademarks too much...). So their objection is not simply that they shouldn't be forced to think up "more original" names, but rather that the system that obliges this practice is fundamentally flawed to begin with. Not saying I agree with this, but I think that's the point of view.
Secondly, as for why more effort isn't put into more creatively naming projects, well it does amazing things for a project (of any kind, not just software) when right out of the gate people know what the project does just by looking at its name. In that sense it's a tremendous benefit to the KIllustrator folks (I'm assuming) that most people know automatically what their software is for just by catching the cute play on words that 'k' in this case affords them.
On a related note, it might actually be in the long run benefit to pursue this course of action and promote "MegaCorp's brand strength", as you put it, because I believe that such trademarks are only valid as long as the trademarked term is not a complete functional synonym of the job it does. Think about Kleenex and tissue paper (or Xerox and photocopiers). The Kleenex brand is so closely synonymous with the tissue product that Kleenex's parent company must articificially promote its competitors in order to avoid losing the trademark.
Hope this doesn't come off as a rant. I just thought that the comment asked a lot of questions that were worth putting my two cents toward answering. Would be great to hear what others think. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
After the Napster thing(tm), everybody is a bit educated in what free software and free music is all about
Don't kid yourself. This is just plain wrong on two points: (1) In napster, most people saw not an opportunity to partake in the debate about free vs. non-free, but rather a chance to download the latest singles (and in some cases, albums) from their favorite artists, gratis.
(2)Napster was never an exercise in free(dom) to begin with. It was another case of an immensely risky loss leader for a company that was hoping to later cash in on its brand. Not that we're seeing this now of course... -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This raises an excellent point. A while back I was working at a tech consultancy that really did the bleeding edge stuff everyone talks about. One day we see an article touting this new study by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) which said basically that wireless was going to be the next big thing. Mind you, this was less than 6 months ago, so none of us at the office thought it particularly newsworthy, nor that it needed to be stated so verbosely in a hundred page "study". We laughed it off as just another example of Andersen being 18 months behind us.
What one of the senior guys pointed out was that we, the geeky tech types, were not the target audience. Instead, Andersen was using this study to prime the pump for its own wireless implementations by planting the seeds in executives' heads. Their name is respected, so CEOs read what they have to say, and then think of them when they finally decide to hop on the wireless bandwagon.
MS is doing the same thing. I was at the Mundie speech with friends and all of us remarked that it was more a press conference than a speech. They're starting slowly on what will be a larger process of "educating" the people who matter. No you, not me, but the people who have the power to make those purchasing decisions. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
... and for those also in attendance I asked the (rather garbled) last question of the session that Mundie pounced on as an example of people's confusion of OSS and open standards. Point to him for my inability to articulate my thoughts.
Anyway, my thoughts on the speech were basically the following:
A: MSFT posits that Redhat and VA are both OSS companies.
B: MSFT posits that Redhat and VA are not doing the same amount of business that MSFT and others are.
C: MSFT posits that OSS companies cannot become the same sorts of profitable businesses that MSFT and others are.
This is a syllogism (I think) and it's a bad one, as most can probably tell, and not just because VA and Redhat are not competitors in the same way Adobe and Macromedia are.
Mundie also used some extremely misleading statistics at the beginning of his remarks about OSS vs. (MSFT + Source Sharing). He states that There are only really 200 or so serious kernel constributors, and in the next breath says there are 1.3 million developers in the entire closed source software industry, the implication being that OSS is puny in comparison and a backwater project doomed to obscurity and/or failure. Pretty shaky logic, so hopefully those NYU B-schoolers could see the gaping holes.
Best part of the speech by far was the Q&A where one guy asked if MSFT had learned anything from OSS development given that it had produced a fine OS with just 200 dev's while it's taken MSFT 10 years and a few thousand trained monkeys. Now that was funny!
... by the lack of short term recall most posters (at elast when browsing +3) seem to be exhibiting. Is this the same group that now regularly has to be reminded that the majority of slashdot visitors are using Windows and IE as their browsing plaform? Did I somehow miss the meeting where we all sat down to debate the technical merits of Windows Web browsers and decided that IE won out? No, I suspect that most here are like myself and simply changed to IE when the features and stability began to outstrip Netscape / Mozilla. It was simply a matter of convenience, since a "better" alternative (that is, IE) was readily available because of that oh-so-handy-but-not-evidence-of-monopoly bundling of browser and OS.
That said, posters' naive assumptions that the majority of users out there (not limited to/. readership) will make the "informed" choice and ditch WMP in favor of some other ripper when they upgrade to XP is sheer lunacy.
Farber's got it right (maybe I shouldn't be deleting all his IP messages after all) when he says consumers will eat what's in front of them. Like it or not, for most consumers computers are an inconvenient appliance that they only use when they have to. It crashes too much, it responds to slowly, and software costs too much. People would feel the same way about TV if it took 10 seconds to change the channel, the way it does to load a graphics heavy Web site over dial-up.
Wired is running an article in which Declan McCollough traces the history of the mythical contention by Al Gore that he "invented the Internet". The article compares to Bogart's never-actually-uttered famous phrase, "Play it again, Sam." Just an FYI.
jMC -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Re:read the fine articles, please
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 1
Agreed (with almost all of your argument). The point of my post was perhaps too well buried beneath the intro; sorry if the bold didn't make up for that.
I don't disagree that the RIAA approaching the problem in a fundamentally wrong way. My take, however, is that some within the org understand this and are working toward changing the focus. I don't mean to overstate this evolution of theirs, but I think it bears at least mentioning given the rabid understatement it regularly receives here.
We don't here much of the "disintermediation" talk that was ubiquitous a few years back in Net-related coversations and articles, but it seems to me the music industry is the first one to really have to grapple with this force in a serious (and seriously threatening) way. Ford will never have to worry about digital reproduction of their cars, but Warner, Sony, et al are in a decidely different boat.
I believe there are people within the RIAA and hopefully the MPAA that understand this. What they are willing/able to do about it is something else entirely. I do NOT mean to be an apologist for either of these groups or the interests they represent, however.
jMC
PS, Also agree that I should finish the article first next time. =) Cheers! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I fail to see how racing to first-post one's erroneous "facts" does this cause any good. That's the ad absurdum response to your point. More realistically, as you put it, I still think the only way to get your point across is to make persuasive points -- as did the professor who testified on behalf of 2600 in the deCSS case -- while remaining an "active" activist in one's non-writing hours.
BTW, would my opinions carry any more weight were I to update my profile with the.com address of my employer or my webmail accounts? I hope not. =) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A caveat: I have not read the ZDNet editorial in its entirety, only the "annotated" bits and pieces reprinted in the comments here on/. So, find a grain of salt to take with you if you decide to read further.
What strikes me most about these (and perhaps most all)/. posts is the way they resemble many of the op-eds in my (old) college newspaper, where students would write about something that irked/pleased/bewildered them. These were generally a collection of gut reactions, with varying degrees eloquence framing their central arguments. What was lacking in most (though certainly not all) was a genuine understanding of the subjects being discussed. They were visceral, often knee-jerk reactions to circumstances and events.
This is, in a sense, what slashdot prides itself on, and perhaps it is not such a bad thing. Spontaneous initial discussions are almost by definition knee-jerk in nature, as they solicit people's immediate reactions to a piece of news ("MS did what?!? Those *&%#$s!") and go from there.
But it seems to me this is not an altogether advantageous trait when/. takes on a political consciousness. To have an impact on issues, one must present a well reasoned argument, complete with supporting facts and trends, and counterarguments (credibly) disputing one's opponent's p.o.v.
Members of the/. readership, whether a majority or a very vocal minority (I don't know), disagree quite vigorously with the stance taken by the RIAA in the Napster case and other areas, often for good reason and occasionally with well supported arguments. But it does this "community" no good to see arguments such as "Beethoven had no copyright; why do the BackStreet Boys need it?" trotted out in support of this cause. (BTW, I browse at +3, so don't bother claiming that this was the "noise" half of the signal-to-noise ratio we discuss here so often.
Perhaps unlike most of the posters (and non-posters here), I've actually met Hilary Rosen (for a few minutes, not long ago, with all this chaos in full swing). What strikes me most about the ZDNet article and the response to it here is the disconnect between her relatively moderate stance (my opinion, nothing more) with regard to the rest of the RIAA, and the unabashed extremism of this community.
I think we would all do well, certainly this "pro file-sharing, anti-corporate leeches" community, to make a good faith effort to understand the RIAA's real position on this matter and how it is evolving. Better information can only strengthen our arguments and thus improve the chances that our opinions will carry some real weight outside these walls.
Maybe my filter's too high to see comments already posted on this, but did anyone notice that the online NYTIMES article did NOT contain an active hyperlink at the bottom of the article (as is their normal practice)?
While the URL of the site is printed at the bottom of the article, it is not linked. This seems too coincidental... -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Does this mean that if they lose (and this linking to other sites with deCSS is not allowed), that JamesSharman has just screwed/. by posting the link to the 2600 catalog here as well?;-)
Yeah, and the Selma, AL. bus boycott in the mid 50s only hurt "legitimate" users of public transit (i.e., blacks) and not the "retarded little shits" (i.e., whites who actively engaged in segregation and oppression of blacks).
The point is that by protesting a wrong we are trying to focus attention on the matter and show the general public that informed, rational computer hackers abhor such activity. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I think one of the things/. readers (and particularly posters) forget is that the tangible (as opposed to ideological) benefits of OSS are available primarily, perhaps solely, to developers, or whatever label you'd like to slap on the technically adept.
This is not a criticism, by any means. As a/.er with a fairly mixed background (non-tech education, tech job), I notice as much as anyone the perhaps unconscious over-assumption of many of my fellow slashdotters that the real benefits of Free/Open Source Code are equally accessible by all.
Mozilla is a case in point in that it is painfully obvious that the project could use more community assistance (I'll be the first to raise my hand as a hypocrite here). Despite its technical elegance and exemplary standards adherence, this is honestly a browser still tragically not ready for prime time.
For this reason it is still a developer's app, no where near idiot-proof enough for general consumption. For the good of this community, it bears upon all of us not to forget that the vast majority of computer users:
-- do not share our fascination with these machines, and
-- lack even a fraction of the computer-manipulation skills that most/.ers take for granted.
So, be humble, patient, and work to make all things Cliff Claven-friendly. =)
What got me from the/. post was the last line about websites being IE enabled for useful tasks. My company (a large consulting firm that will remain anonymous) has already taken this step. Access to the company intranet is restricted to clients using IE, and this trend seems to be spilling over into other areas as well.
I have to agree with other posts that the level of innovation included in each new Navigator release is pretty pathetic. I used to download and install each new version with glee a few years ago, but lately there seems to be nothing in the new versions that even slightly interests me.
IE, on the other hand, seems to continue pushing forward. Browsing certain sights is a completely different experience using the features IE has implemented, while with Navigator the pages look, well, as boring and static as they would have with the HTML 2.0 spec.
Like everyone else, I think I'm hoping Mozilla can be the cure to this problem. The layout engine *is* fantastic, and as someone else has said, if they can get the program to load anywhere near as fast as IE does, it'll be a big blow to IE.
Sorry. I use a Win box at home and was so delirious when I saw the links that I just marked up the one I was using myself without a thought. Next time, next time.
Slashdot Mirror
The codification of laws was a great advance for humankind.
The codification of of humankind offers no such benefit.
If you think that companies like News Corp and TimeWarner (AOL must be salivating too) would kill for the chance to be a monopolistic provider of news to the country/world's population, think again. The result of such a situation would not be raising of the TV quality bar, but a drastic lowering of it.
Remember, monopoly (or even oligopoly) does not lead to heightened quality, higher standards, or any sort of remotely positive results when diversity is a key concern -- EVER.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
First you ask why people waste time trying to argue against trademarking of various terms. Well, some people (especially those who frequent this site) tend to think that the patenting and/or trademarking of such terms is a ridiculous concept ab inicio. (Sorry if I'm blurring the objection to patents/copyrights with trademarks too much...). So their objection is not simply that they shouldn't be forced to think up "more original" names, but rather that the system that obliges this practice is fundamentally flawed to begin with. Not saying I agree with this, but I think that's the point of view.
Secondly, as for why more effort isn't put into more creatively naming projects, well it does amazing things for a project (of any kind, not just software) when right out of the gate people know what the project does just by looking at its name. In that sense it's a tremendous benefit to the KIllustrator folks (I'm assuming) that most people know automatically what their software is for just by catching the cute play on words that 'k' in this case affords them.
On a related note, it might actually be in the long run benefit to pursue this course of action and promote "MegaCorp's brand strength", as you put it, because I believe that such trademarks are only valid as long as the trademarked term is not a complete functional synonym of the job it does. Think about Kleenex and tissue paper (or Xerox and photocopiers). The Kleenex brand is so closely synonymous with the tissue product that Kleenex's parent company must articificially promote its competitors in order to avoid losing the trademark.
Hope this doesn't come off as a rant. I just thought that the comment asked a lot of questions that were worth putting my two cents toward answering. Would be great to hear what others think.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Don't kid yourself. This is just plain wrong on two points: (1) In napster, most people saw not an opportunity to partake in the debate about free vs. non-free, but rather a chance to download the latest singles (and in some cases, albums) from their favorite artists, gratis.
(2)Napster was never an exercise in free(dom) to begin with. It was another case of an immensely risky loss leader for a company that was hoping to later cash in on its brand. Not that we're seeing this now of course...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
75 Solaris machines? Where we these a few years ago? I thought most of the labs were running a mix of Unix and Windoze these days...
Sorry for the offtopic post. Just the confused babblings of an alumnus.
jMC
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This raises an excellent point. A while back I was working at a tech consultancy that really did the bleeding edge stuff everyone talks about. One day we see an article touting this new study by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) which said basically that wireless was going to be the next big thing. Mind you, this was less than 6 months ago, so none of us at the office thought it particularly newsworthy, nor that it needed to be stated so verbosely in a hundred page "study". We laughed it off as just another example of Andersen being 18 months behind us.
What one of the senior guys pointed out was that we, the geeky tech types, were not the target audience. Instead, Andersen was using this study to prime the pump for its own wireless implementations by planting the seeds in executives' heads. Their name is respected, so CEOs read what they have to say, and then think of them when they finally decide to hop on the wireless bandwagon.
MS is doing the same thing. I was at the Mundie speech with friends and all of us remarked that it was more a press conference than a speech. They're starting slowly on what will be a larger process of "educating" the people who matter. No you, not me, but the people who have the power to make those purchasing decisions.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Anyway, my thoughts on the speech were basically the following:
This is a syllogism (I think) and it's a bad one, as most can probably tell, and not just because VA and Redhat are not competitors in the same way Adobe and Macromedia are.
Mundie also used some extremely misleading statistics at the beginning of his remarks about OSS vs. (MSFT + Source Sharing). He states that There are only really 200 or so serious kernel constributors, and in the next breath says there are 1.3 million developers in the entire closed source software industry, the implication being that OSS is puny in comparison and a backwater project doomed to obscurity and/or failure. Pretty shaky logic, so hopefully those NYU B-schoolers could see the gaping holes.
Best part of the speech by far was the Q&A where one guy asked if MSFT had learned anything from OSS development given that it had produced a fine OS with just 200 dev's while it's taken MSFT 10 years and a few thousand trained monkeys. Now that was funny!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
... by the lack of short term recall most posters (at elast when browsing +3) seem to be exhibiting. Is this the same group that now regularly has to be reminded that the majority of slashdot visitors are using Windows and IE as their browsing plaform? Did I somehow miss the meeting where we all sat down to debate the technical merits of Windows Web browsers and decided that IE won out? No, I suspect that most here are like myself and simply changed to IE when the features and stability began to outstrip Netscape / Mozilla. It was simply a matter of convenience, since a "better" alternative (that is, IE) was readily available because of that oh-so-handy-but-not-evidence-of-monopoly bundling of browser and OS.
/. readership) will make the "informed" choice and ditch WMP in favor of some other ripper when they upgrade to XP is sheer lunacy.
That said, posters' naive assumptions that the majority of users out there (not limited to
Farber's got it right (maybe I shouldn't be deleting all his IP messages after all) when he says consumers will eat what's in front of them. Like it or not, for most consumers computers are an inconvenient appliance that they only use when they have to. It crashes too much, it responds to slowly, and software costs too much. People would feel the same way about TV if it took 10 seconds to change the channel, the way it does to load a graphics heavy Web site over dial-up.
My 2 cents.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Wired is running an article in which Declan McCollough traces the history of the mythical contention by Al Gore that he "invented the Internet". The article compares to Bogart's never-actually-uttered famous phrase, "Play it again, Sam." Just an FYI.
jMC
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Agreed (with almost all of your argument). The point of my post was perhaps too well buried beneath the intro; sorry if the bold didn't make up for that.
I don't disagree that the RIAA approaching the problem in a fundamentally wrong way. My take, however, is that some within the org understand this and are working toward changing the focus. I don't mean to overstate this evolution of theirs, but I think it bears at least mentioning given the rabid understatement it regularly receives here.
We don't here much of the "disintermediation" talk that was ubiquitous a few years back in Net-related coversations and articles, but it seems to me the music industry is the first one to really have to grapple with this force in a serious (and seriously threatening) way. Ford will never have to worry about digital reproduction of their cars, but Warner, Sony, et al are in a decidely different boat.
I believe there are people within the RIAA and hopefully the MPAA that understand this. What they are willing/able to do about it is something else entirely. I do NOT mean to be an apologist for either of these groups or the interests they represent, however.
jMC
PS, Also agree that I should finish the article first next time. =) Cheers!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I fail to see how racing to first-post one's erroneous "facts" does this cause any good. That's the ad absurdum response to your point. More realistically, as you put it, I still think the only way to get your point across is to make persuasive points -- as did the professor who testified on behalf of 2600 in the deCSS case -- while remaining an "active" activist in one's non-writing hours.
.com address of my employer or my webmail accounts? I hope not. =)
BTW, would my opinions carry any more weight were I to update my profile with the
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A caveat: I have not read the ZDNet editorial in its entirety, only the "annotated" bits and pieces reprinted in the comments here on /. So, find a grain of salt to take with you if you decide to read further.
/. posts is the way they resemble many of the op-eds in my (old) college newspaper, where students would write about something that irked/pleased/bewildered them. These were generally a collection of gut reactions, with varying degrees eloquence framing their central arguments. What was lacking in most (though certainly not all) was a genuine understanding of the subjects being discussed. They were visceral, often knee-jerk reactions to circumstances and events.
/. takes on a political consciousness. To have an impact on issues, one must present a well reasoned argument, complete with supporting facts and trends, and counterarguments (credibly) disputing one's opponent's p.o.v.
/. readership, whether a majority or a very vocal minority (I don't know), disagree quite vigorously with the stance taken by the RIAA in the Napster case and other areas, often for good reason and occasionally with well supported arguments. But it does this "community" no good to see arguments such as "Beethoven had no copyright; why do the BackStreet Boys need it?" trotted out in support of this cause. (BTW, I browse at +3, so don't bother claiming that this was the "noise" half of the signal-to-noise ratio we discuss here so often.
What strikes me most about these (and perhaps most all)
This is, in a sense, what slashdot prides itself on, and perhaps it is not such a bad thing. Spontaneous initial discussions are almost by definition knee-jerk in nature, as they solicit people's immediate reactions to a piece of news ("MS did what?!? Those *&%#$s!") and go from there.
But it seems to me this is not an altogether advantageous trait when
Members of the
Perhaps unlike most of the posters (and non-posters here), I've actually met Hilary Rosen (for a few minutes, not long ago, with all this chaos in full swing). What strikes me most about the ZDNet article and the response to it here is the disconnect between her relatively moderate stance (my opinion, nothing more) with regard to the rest of the RIAA, and the unabashed extremism of this community.
I think we would all do well, certainly this "pro file-sharing, anti-corporate leeches" community, to make a good faith effort to understand the RIAA's real position on this matter and how it is evolving. Better information can only strengthen our arguments and thus improve the chances that our opinions will carry some real weight outside these walls.
jMC
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
While the URL of the site is printed at the bottom of the article, it is not linked. This seems too coincidental...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Does this mean that if they lose (and this linking to other sites with deCSS is not allowed), that JamesSharman has just screwed /. by posting the link to the 2600 catalog here as well? ;-)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The point is that by protesting a wrong we are trying to focus attention on the matter and show the general public that informed, rational computer hackers abhor such activity.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is not a criticism, by any means. As a
Mozilla is a case in point in that it is painfully obvious that the project could use more community assistance (I'll be the first to raise my hand as a hypocrite here). Despite its technical elegance and exemplary standards adherence, this is honestly a browser still tragically not ready for prime time.
For this reason it is still a developer's app, no where near idiot-proof enough for general consumption. For the good of this community, it bears upon all of us not to forget that the vast majority of computer users:
-- do not share our fascination with these machines, and
-- lack even a fraction of the computer-manipulation skills that most
So, be humble, patient, and work to make all things Cliff Claven-friendly. =)
jMC
What got me from the /. post was the last line about websites being IE enabled for useful tasks. My company (a large consulting firm that will remain anonymous) has already taken this step. Access to the company intranet is restricted to clients using IE, and this trend seems to be spilling over into other areas as well.
I have to agree with other posts that the level of innovation included in each new Navigator release is pretty pathetic. I used to download and install each new version with glee a few years ago, but lately there seems to be nothing in the new versions that even slightly interests me.
IE, on the other hand, seems to continue pushing forward. Browsing certain sights is a completely different experience using the features IE has implemented, while with Navigator the pages look, well, as boring and static as they would have with the HTML 2.0 spec.
Like everyone else, I think I'm hoping Mozilla can be the cure to this problem. The layout engine *is* fantastic, and as someone else has said, if they can get the program to load anywhere near as fast as IE does, it'll be a big blow to IE.
Sorry. I use a Win box at home and was so delirious when I saw the links that I just marked up the one I was using myself without a thought. Next time, next time.
Just in case anyone was thrown off by the /. headline, the beta is available now, since the article mentioned was from 04/14. Cheers
Just in case anyone was thrown off by the /. headline, the beta is available now, since the article mentioned was from 04/14. Cheers