Hi there soldier! You seem to have lost power to both engines secondary to a software malfunction, over hostile territory. Would you like me to help you reboot Windows?
Whaddya mean Windows?
There's a reason it's called "Colonel Panic" (sic), you know.
And why is it called DISTRIBUTED computing? A single PS2 wouldn't necessarily be handling a full frame. With enough machines nearby, you COULD handle realtime raytracing, that's what DISTRIBUTED means!
Which is where the problems come in.
Firstly, you'd need a many to 1 relationship to produce raytraced frames. That relationship would need to be stable. So you'd need to have machines powered up, sitting idle, and online ready to render for you.
Those machines have to be physically near to you, because otherwise latency becomes a problem.
Because you're in the same time zone as the people around you, you'd have to stagger your game playing time, or face ending up with something that looks like bad 100x100 MPEG4 encoding designed to go over a 300baud line. Think cable-modem users in high-usage areas.
That's, of course, not taking into account that you'd have to have a fallback mechanism which rendered everything on-machine in case the network was congested, which means more work for the games developers, and a massively variable game-playing experience for the user. Massively variable to the point of wanting to put your foot through the screen.
On top of that, add the fact that raytracing is NOT scalable the way you seem to think it is. Each frame, updated 30 or 60 times a second, has the potential (with a very high probability) of being radically different to the next. Different game players with almost certainty are going to need completely different renderings of the same scene. Therefore, distribution will not work well for rendering for a large number of players.
If you can arrange some kind of pyramid scheme where you get people to buy PS3's, live next door to you and set up a WIFI network, and then only use them when you're at work, you might have a viable system here. Ultimately, however, distributed rendering is a completely unworkable, non-viable solution for home gameplaying. Before you bring it up, renderfarms for CGI movies are a completely different case, because they're only rendering for ONE output target. Only one view at a time is rendered, and what's being rendered remains fixed.
Distributed AI, or distributed world logic for things like MMRPGs may work. But to be honest, I can't really see how that would be any different to the way it already works on the PC or the XBOX.
It's all bunkum. They made shit up. Stop apologizing for them, and accept that they're playing the vaporware game in a very very obvious and very evil way.
You are just purely on crack. I think you mean 160ms for gaming. How do you think that the network adapter works for gaming? Well, over the inter-fucking-net. Not over some magical 16ms ether.
That's all well and good, but they were talking about using P2P for rendering the display. Which would mean that they'd need approximately 1.5MB of data to be transferred every 30ms with less than 30ms latency (otherwise you get framedrops).
They were NOT talking about sending some kind of pissant little state-info to a remote server so that it can keep track of the players. They were talking about realtime raytracing.
Ergo, it's bullshit.
I think your problem is that you are an idiot that doesn't know what you are talking about. Not them making empty promises. Sony actually makes good electronic components for consumers.
And I think your problem is that you're an idiot who REALLY doesn't know what he's talking about, who likes to think he does, and then claims that others are idiots when in reality you don't have a leg to stand on.
I know Sony makes good products - I have a Sony VCR, and a Sony HDTV - but that's the products on the shelves, not vacuous vaporware promises that they put out to prevent themselves from getting eaten alive by the XBOX.
This is the same Sony who claimed that they'd build a P2P network for the Playstation 3 whereby other people's PS's not in use would do all of the processing grunt work.
Completely ignoring the fact that with broadband, you're typically 30ms minimum from your nearest neighbor, and good gaming requires a guarantee of 16ms max.
They're a bunch of liars. Fool me once, shame on me. Except they didn't fool anyone the first time.
Face it, if you want an admin who doesn't read the docs, why don't you pay that person just above, say, minimum wage? No, an admin is paid to read the documentation and know his or her stuff. Otherwise, it is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Which gently misses the point.
Both the Mac and Windows can do exactly what they were trying to do without anyone having to read the manuals, or do anything special.
From the article:
The only major roadblock we came up against was transferring files to or from the office server over the LAN browser, which runs on a technology called Samba that communicates with Windows networks. Samba had difficulty navigating the way permissions were set up on the network, and was unable to authorise us to read or write files on the server, although we were able to browse the network. After much tinkering, it appeared that the solution would be to change the way the network's permissions were set up -- something many companies would find unacceptable.
This was the only stumbling block that prevented us from getting work done, but it is a serious flaw. The quick-moving open source community may soon solve the problem, but that will not be good enough for companies wishing to install Linux desktops today. It's worth noting that Apple, with its Unix-based Mac OS X, has already implemented a working solution to this problem -- OS X had no trouble browsing the office network and reading and writing files.
Sure... turn off all network security, and it'll work. Or completely reconfigure SAMBA. Why doesn't it just do authentication automatically? If a user has privileges on the target machine, they should be able to access anything that they're allowed to. SAMBA's configuration should - by default - have absolutely squat to do with whether or not a user can access network resources.
You have this wonderful multi user OS and you use it on a single PC, arghhh.
Centralised computing is where most companies should be at, cheap disposable terminals on the desktop and a beast of a server under lock and key.
Linux will rule the enterprise desktop when companies grasp the mainfram had the right network architecture. Until then they're just wasting money.
That's all well and good if you've got a massive bank account... but if you're a startup, a small business or a mid-size company, you typically can't afford to build an air-conditioned, water cooled mainframe room with networking to every single room in your building. Especially if you have only 20 users talking to a $10,000,000 mainframe.
The centralized computing 'paradigm' is a bad one. It makes much more sense to go for a distributed model with a PC on every desk. Sure, you duplicate some physical hardware, but the system as a whole scales rather incredibly well.
It sounds like someone was trying to set up SAMBA without reading the documentation or they were lazy in matching the networks. Having used SAMBA in a mixed SUN and Microsoft environment, it was considered a godsend from both the Windows admins and the UN*X/SUN admins.
Why on earth should they read the documentation? It's not like you need to read the docs on the Mac or Windows to do exactly the same thing...
The author of the article is interested in the app but has reservations about that technology. What is so inappropriate about stating that?
Umm... the fact that the author of the article didn't mention that at all, and it was a comment from Michael, one of the editors, who has a chip on his shoulder about all things Microsoft, perhaps?
The standard e-mail message notifying a recipient of the availability of a greeting card from Microsoft's own "insider.MSN.com/greetings" website is sorted by the Outlook Express beta release to the Junk Mail folder. In order to confirm this, on December 9, 1998, five greetings cards from plaintiff's web site and five from the insider.MSN.com/greetings site were sent to me. I received the e-mail notification for these ten cards with the junk mail feature of the Outlook Express beta release turned on, but otherwise set to its default settings. All ten e-mail notification messages were sorted by the Outlook Express beta release to the Junk Mail folder. A copy of the Junk Mail folder showing the receipt of these ten messages is attached as Exhibit C.
(So, in other words, Blue Mountain had a frivolous suit and went to court instead of trying to fix the problem. Microsoft originally approached them to work together to provide a workaround. Blue Mountain Arts dismissed it out of hand.)
The "start button" is almost an exact copy of the Apple menu. But let's not go into how Windows rips off Macs _again_, okay?
Apart from the fact that the Apple menu only holds applets (so if anything, the Control Panel is a rip off of the Apple Menu) you might have had a point there.
When the Apple menu is designed to start all of the applications installed on a Mac instead of having to dig them out using Finder, you might have a point.
The fs compression code that MS stole from Stacker, Inc., and was sued over, and lost, is a better example. Nor is that the only case where MS was found to have stolen proprietary code. So, given that, it's not surprising that MS feels that free software developers would steal; after all, they (MS) clearly do so without hestitation, why would they expect any better of anyone else?
" Waterworth patented a LZ77 variant (US Patent 4701745). This algorithm is generally referred to as as LZRW1, because Ross Williams reinvented it later and posted it on comp.compression on April 22, 1991. The same algorithm has later been patented by Gibson & Graybill (US Patent 5049881). The patent office failed to recognize that the same algorithm was patented twice, even though the wording used in the two patents is very similar.
The Waterworth patent is now owned by Stac, which won a lawsuit against Microsoft, concerning the compression feature of MS-DOS 6.0. Damages awarded were $120 million. (Microsoft and Stac later settled out of court.) "
From his resume: "Consulting to Microsoft: In 1993 Stac initiated a software patent lawsuit against Microsoft over the doublespace data compression feature of MS-DOS 6. As part of its defence, Microsoft retained me as an expert in text data compression. Tasks involved searching for prior art and evaluating patents. "
"Unfortunately, during this happy rollout, some patents popped out of the US patent system that cast a shadow over the LZRW series algorithms, and they became effectively unuseable in any practical application. If you want to use them in any product (whether free or commercial), you will have to do some in-depth patent homework and algorithm development/modification so as to avoid infringement. If you think that's easy, then you should be aware that Microsoft tried to use an LZ77/LZRW1/etc variant, specifically designed not to infringe existing patents, in its MS-DOS V6 operating system, and ended up having to pay Stac about $80m in the resulting patent lawsuit. For this reason, I would like to take this opportunity to state that the code provided in this web (and FTP site) is provided with the intention that it be used for educational and recreational use only. "
No it doesn't. No where in US copyright law is there even the vaguest hint that copyright is property. I checked. Feel free to check yourself. And I guarantee that no where in US property law does it say copyrights are property, though I admid I have not checked all of it:)
Read Title 17, Chapter 2. Section 202 explains one of the key differences between material property and intellectual property (namely that transfer of ownership of physical property does not confer the intellectual property rights).
The presence of credible competitors does not automatically prove that M$ is all fairplay now. It simply means M$ does and is still trying to suppress alternatives as much as possible but not being 100% successfull in its effort.
Then your course is clear:
You have options.
Make use of them.
Vote with your wallet, and Microsoft can't do anything about it.
Your argument is flawed anyway; the Mac has been around since 1984. Microsoft can't do anything about that.
"uninstall it and change"? Change to what, exactly? Until just a few years ago, there was no credible alternate PC desktop operating system. Microsoft successfully prevented any such competitors from ever developing due to OEM contracts, etc.
Don't put the cart before the horse.
No OEM in their right mind would include a completely non-credible alternative PC desktop OS... no contracts are necessary to prevent any competitors from developing.
Now if they were credible competitors, that's different... but that would also undermine your argument.
Then we're about even, because you went off on a complete tangent from my original point in the first place.
It is impossible to own [a particular arrangement of] information.
And why do you think that? Certainly, copyright law disagrees with you on that point. And it has for at least a hundred years, so I'm willing to bet that you're in the minority in that view.
It is impossible to own information. Information is not and cannot be property. That does not mean copyrights do not exist or that they are invalid. But it does mean that the rights of copy are different from the rights of property. The term "intellectual property" is an oxymoron.
The use of the term "intellectual property" almost always leads to absurd conclusions that there is something wrong with ordinary copyright law. People constantly make claims that copyright holders should obviously have the same rights as property owners. I have seen ludacis statements that the law discriminates against copyright holders.
For over two hundred years copyright holders have NOT had the same rights as property owners. Copyrights aren't SUPPOSED to be property rights. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the copyright law we had just a few years ago. The law wasn't broken. It's people claiming "intellectual property" who are saying the law is broken. They trying to change the law. It is those changes that create broken law.
No one is claiming that "information" is property. The claim is that this particular arrangement of it is.
Information = the alphabet. Intellectual Property = sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books...
Great point. I'd also like to add: enough with the "Intellectual Property" nonsense. The lawyers in the interview keep referring to the Constitution providing for such an idea; it does not. Nowhere is there the slightest suggestion that ideas (or their implementation) are == property. You cannot own the intangible, no matter how many times you repeat the words. If it doesn't exist, you can't own it. Say it to yourself. Disagree? Hand me a song, and I'll reconsider. (That's the song itself, not a CD, not sheet music representing the song, but the song itself. Hand it to me.) The song is just an idea we all agree on. It does not and cannot exist in tangible reality.
You cannot own ideas -- or, let's say that you can (even though the Constitution says otherwise). I know your idea (your song, let's say). I would have to conclude that you now own the piece of my brain that knows your song. You can probably charge me royalties for knowing it, unless I can prove I have forgotten it (and how can I do that?). You own part of me.
There's a big difference between a book and an idea, or a CD and an idea, or a piece of software and an idea.
People have ideas all the time. It takes patience, inspiration, hard work, blood, sweat and tears to turn an idea into a finished work.
Here's an idea for you: A guy meets a mad scientist, and gets sent into the past to meet his parents.
Here's something a hell of a lot more than just an idea for you:
http://us.imdb.com/Details?0088763 Back to the Future.
Ideas ain't worth shit by themselves. And you're kidding yourself if you think that a song is an "idea we all agree on".
This is why Microsoft collects patents. It's not to litigate against other companies (although the conspiracy-theory, marijuana paranoia fueled guys will claim otherwise)... it's to get them out of holes like this.
They can now turn around and tell said company "Hey, we might infringe this one... but you infringe this one, this one, oh! and this one".
One cross-patent licensing deal later, and everyone's happy.
Heck, at the moment I'm working on a 35 minute long short film. No-budget. Cutting corners as much as possible, and it's still going to cost (by the time it's all done and finished) about $45,000.
And that's for just me, using existing locations, paying as few people as possible, and relying on a lot of goodwill because, well, people want to make movies.
Start talking about high production values, and you quickly shoot up into the millions. One feature film idea I have will cost around $7MM to shoot, give or take. And that's before you worry about paying for 'stars'. That's just the cost of getting it from A to B.
It's not easy, involves hundreds of people, and costs a lot of money. Do you actually have any idea how much a "million" is worth these days? Your average company (startup, tech, whatever) of 10 people will survive for a year on a million dollars. It's not much money for a lot of people - for an individual who wants to sit on their ass and go to the Bahamas for the rest of their lives? Sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this pretty much the same idea that Apple had some time ago?
Not really. Sounds like that patent is for the iPod shuttle control to me.
Simon
ahhh, but I bet you don't remember the Spectrum-compatible, Sam Coupe?
;-)
I do
Hi there soldier! You seem to have lost power to both engines secondary to a software malfunction, over hostile territory. Would you like me to help you reboot Windows?
Whaddya mean Windows?
There's a reason it's called "Colonel Panic" (sic), you know.
And why is it called DISTRIBUTED computing? A single PS2 wouldn't necessarily be handling a full frame. With enough machines nearby, you COULD handle realtime raytracing, that's what DISTRIBUTED means!
Which is where the problems come in.
Firstly, you'd need a many to 1 relationship to produce raytraced frames. That relationship would need to be stable. So you'd need to have machines powered up, sitting idle, and online ready to render for you.
Those machines have to be physically near to you, because otherwise latency becomes a problem.
Because you're in the same time zone as the people around you, you'd have to stagger your game playing time, or face ending up with something that looks like bad 100x100 MPEG4 encoding designed to go over a 300baud line. Think cable-modem users in high-usage areas.
That's, of course, not taking into account that you'd have to have a fallback mechanism which rendered everything on-machine in case the network was congested, which means more work for the games developers, and a massively variable game-playing experience for the user. Massively variable to the point of wanting to put your foot through the screen.
On top of that, add the fact that raytracing is NOT scalable the way you seem to think it is. Each frame, updated 30 or 60 times a second, has the potential (with a very high probability) of being radically different to the next. Different game players with almost certainty are going to need completely different renderings of the same scene. Therefore, distribution will not work well for rendering for a large number of players.
If you can arrange some kind of pyramid scheme where you get people to buy PS3's, live next door to you and set up a WIFI network, and then only use them when you're at work, you might have a viable system here. Ultimately, however, distributed rendering is a completely unworkable, non-viable solution for home gameplaying. Before you bring it up, renderfarms for CGI movies are a completely different case, because they're only rendering for ONE output target. Only one view at a time is rendered, and what's being rendered remains fixed.
Distributed AI, or distributed world logic for things like MMRPGs may work. But to be honest, I can't really see how that would be any different to the way it already works on the PC or the XBOX.
It's all bunkum. They made shit up. Stop apologizing for them, and accept that they're playing the vaporware game in a very very obvious and very evil way.
You are just purely on crack. I think you mean 160ms for gaming. How do you think that the network adapter works for gaming? Well, over the inter-fucking-net. Not over some magical 16ms ether.
That's all well and good, but they were talking about using P2P for rendering the display. Which would mean that they'd need approximately 1.5MB of data to be transferred every 30ms with less than 30ms latency (otherwise you get framedrops).
They were NOT talking about sending some kind of pissant little state-info to a remote server so that it can keep track of the players. They were talking about realtime raytracing.
Ergo, it's bullshit.
I think your problem is that you are an idiot that doesn't know what you are talking about. Not them making empty promises. Sony actually makes good electronic components for consumers.
And I think your problem is that you're an idiot who REALLY doesn't know what he's talking about, who likes to think he does, and then claims that others are idiots when in reality you don't have a leg to stand on.
I know Sony makes good products - I have a Sony VCR, and a Sony HDTV - but that's the products on the shelves, not vacuous vaporware promises that they put out to prevent themselves from getting eaten alive by the XBOX.
I know. That was the abridged version, which actually makes more sense to me. You shouldn't be fooled the first time ;-)
This is the same Sony who claimed that they'd build a P2P network for the Playstation 3 whereby other people's PS's not in use would do all of the processing grunt work.
Completely ignoring the fact that with broadband, you're typically 30ms minimum from your nearest neighbor, and good gaming requires a guarantee of 16ms max.
They're a bunch of liars. Fool me once, shame on me. Except they didn't fool anyone the first time.
really?
6 005
ok.. take any random sales person at your office and have them, without telling them how, to have that machine join the domain...
wow... why didn't they know how? Windows is so intuitive! they should have easily figured it out!
get a clue you knob.
Yet another prat misses the point.
Read and learn:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=72750&cid=655
Which gently misses the point.
Both the Mac and Windows can do exactly what they were trying to do without anyone having to read the manuals, or do anything special.
From the article:
Sure... turn off all network security, and it'll work. Or completely reconfigure SAMBA. Why doesn't it just do authentication automatically? If a user has privileges on the target machine, they should be able to access anything that they're allowed to. SAMBA's configuration should - by default - have absolutely squat to do with whether or not a user can access network resources.
You have this wonderful multi user OS and you use it on a single PC, arghhh.
Centralised computing is where most companies should be at, cheap disposable terminals on the desktop and a beast of a server under lock and key.
Linux will rule the enterprise desktop when companies grasp the mainfram had the right network architecture. Until then they're just wasting money.
That's all well and good if you've got a massive bank account... but if you're a startup, a small business or a mid-size company, you typically can't afford to build an air-conditioned, water cooled mainframe room with networking to every single room in your building. Especially if you have only 20 users talking to a $10,000,000 mainframe.
The centralized computing 'paradigm' is a bad one. It makes much more sense to go for a distributed model with a PC on every desk. Sure, you duplicate some physical hardware, but the system as a whole scales rather incredibly well.
It sounds like someone was trying to set up SAMBA without reading the documentation or they were lazy in matching the networks. Having used SAMBA in a mixed SUN and Microsoft environment, it was considered a godsend from both the Windows admins and the UN*X/SUN admins.
Why on earth should they read the documentation? It's not like you need to read the docs on the Mac or Windows to do exactly the same thing...
Awww damnit. Sorry, I goofed. Misread the attribution; the comment was indeed from the author.
The author of the article is interested in the app but has reservations about that technology. What is so inappropriate about stating that?
Umm... the fact that the author of the article didn't mention that at all, and it was a comment from Michael, one of the editors, who has a chip on his shoulder about all things Microsoft, perhaps?
the shafting of SpyGlass Systems
Spyglass Soars on new Microsoft Deal
Blue Mountain Greeting Cards
Deposition
The standard e-mail message notifying a recipient of the availability of a greeting card from Microsoft's own "insider.MSN.com/greetings" website is sorted by the Outlook Express beta release to the Junk Mail folder. In order to confirm this, on December 9, 1998, five greetings cards from plaintiff's web site and five from the insider.MSN.com/greetings site were sent to me. I received the e-mail notification for these ten cards with the junk mail feature of the Outlook Express beta release turned on, but otherwise set to its default settings. All ten e-mail notification messages were sorted by the Outlook Express beta release to the Junk Mail folder. A copy of the Junk Mail folder showing the receipt of these ten messages is attached as Exhibit C.
(So, in other words, Blue Mountain had a frivolous suit and went to court instead of trying to fix the problem. Microsoft originally approached them to work together to provide a workaround. Blue Mountain Arts dismissed it out of hand.)
The "start button" is almost an exact copy of the Apple menu. But let's not go into how Windows rips off Macs _again_, okay?
Apart from the fact that the Apple menu only holds applets (so if anything, the Control Panel is a rip off of the Apple Menu) you might have had a point there.
When the Apple menu is designed to start all of the applications installed on a Mac instead of having to dig them out using Finder, you might have a point.
The fs compression code that MS stole from Stacker, Inc., and was sued over, and lost, is a better example. Nor is that the only case where MS was found to have stolen proprietary code. So, given that, it's not surprising that MS feels that free software developers would steal; after all, they (MS) clearly do so without hestitation, why would they expect any better of anyone else?
Nice assertion, but Microsoft didn't take any of Stac's code, it was a patent infringement case
Stac. Timeline. Syn'X.
Microsoft have "stolen" code more than once. But because it's closed source, it is difficult for the victims to discover and prove the infringement
Ah, this old chestnut.
Stac was a PATENT INFRINGEMENT case. No code was touched.
here's some words from an
expert in the field of compression and patents:
http://www.ross.net/compression/
" Waterworth patented a LZ77 variant (US Patent 4701745). This algorithm
is generally referred to as as LZRW1, because Ross Williams reinvented
it later and posted it on comp.compression on April 22, 1991. The same
algorithm has later been patented by Gibson & Graybill (US Patent
5049881). The patent office failed to recognize that the same algorithm
was patented twice, even though the wording used in the two patents is
very similar.
The Waterworth patent is now owned by Stac, which won a lawsuit against
Microsoft, concerning the compression feature of MS-DOS 6.0. Damages
awarded were $120 million. (Microsoft and Stac later settled out of
court.) "
From his resume: "Consulting to Microsoft: In 1993 Stac initiated a
software patent lawsuit against Microsoft over the doublespace data
compression feature of MS-DOS 6. As part of its defence, Microsoft
retained me as an expert in text data compression. Tasks involved
searching for prior art and evaluating patents. "
Most importantly, however:
http://www.ross.net/compression/introduction.html
"Unfortunately, during this happy rollout, some patents popped out of
the US patent system that cast a shadow over the LZRW series algorithms,
and they became effectively unuseable in any practical application. If
you want to use them in any product (whether free or commercial), you
will have to do some in-depth patent homework and algorithm
development/modification so as to avoid infringement. If you think
that's easy, then you should be aware that Microsoft tried to use an
LZ77/LZRW1/etc variant, specifically designed not to infringe existing
patents, in its MS-DOS V6 operating system, and ended up having to pay
Stac about $80m in the resulting patent lawsuit. For this reason, I
would like to take this opportunity to state that the code provided in
this web (and FTP site) is provided with the intention that it be used
for educational and recreational use only. "
No it doesn't. No where in US copyright law is there even the vaguest hint that copyright is property. I checked. Feel free to check yourself. And I guarantee that no where in US property law does it say copyrights are property, though I admid I have not checked all of it :)
Read Title 17, Chapter 2. Section 202 explains one of the key differences between material property and intellectual property (namely that transfer of ownership of physical property does not confer the intellectual property rights).
The presence of credible competitors does not automatically prove that M$ is all fairplay now. It simply means M$ does and is still trying to suppress alternatives as much as possible but not being 100% successfull in its effort.
Then your course is clear:
You have options.
Make use of them.
Vote with your wallet, and Microsoft can't do anything about it.
Your argument is flawed anyway; the Mac has been around since 1984. Microsoft can't do anything about that.
"uninstall it and change"? Change to what, exactly? Until just a few years ago, there was no credible alternate PC desktop operating system. Microsoft successfully prevented any such competitors from ever developing due to OEM contracts, etc.
Don't put the cart before the horse.
No OEM in their right mind would include a completely non-credible alternative PC desktop OS... no contracts are necessary to prevent any competitors from developing.
Now if they were credible competitors, that's different... but that would also undermine your argument.
You have not addressed a single thing I said.
Then we're about even, because you went off on a complete tangent from my original point in the first place.
It is impossible to own [a particular arrangement of] information.
And why do you think that? Certainly, copyright law disagrees with you on that point. And it has for at least a hundred years, so I'm willing to bet that you're in the minority in that view.
It is impossible to own information. Information is not and cannot be property. That does not mean copyrights do not exist or that they are invalid. But it does mean that the rights of copy are different from the rights of property. The term "intellectual property" is an oxymoron.
The use of the term "intellectual property" almost always leads to absurd conclusions that there is something wrong with ordinary copyright law. People constantly make claims that copyright holders should obviously have the same rights as property owners. I have seen ludacis statements that the law discriminates against copyright holders.
For over two hundred years copyright holders have NOT had the same rights as property owners. Copyrights aren't SUPPOSED to be property rights. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the copyright law we had just a few years ago. The law wasn't broken. It's people claiming "intellectual property" who are saying the law is broken. They trying to change the law. It is those changes that create broken law.
No one is claiming that "information" is property. The claim is that this particular arrangement of it is.
Information = the alphabet.
Intellectual Property = sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books...
Get it now?
Great point. I'd also like to add: enough with the "Intellectual Property" nonsense. The lawyers in the interview keep referring to the Constitution providing for such an idea; it does not. Nowhere is there the slightest suggestion that ideas (or their implementation) are == property. You cannot own the intangible, no matter how many times you repeat the words. If it doesn't exist, you can't own it. Say it to yourself.
Disagree? Hand me a song, and I'll reconsider. (That's the song itself, not a CD, not sheet music representing the song, but the song itself. Hand it to me.) The song is just an idea we all agree on. It does not and cannot exist in tangible reality.
You cannot own ideas -- or, let's say that you can (even though the Constitution says otherwise). I know your idea (your song, let's say). I would have to conclude that you now own the piece of my brain that knows your song. You can probably charge me royalties for knowing it, unless I can prove I have forgotten it (and how can I do that?). You own part of me.
There's a big difference between a book and an idea, or a CD and an idea, or a piece of software and an idea.
People have ideas all the time. It takes patience, inspiration, hard work, blood, sweat and tears to turn an idea into a finished work.
Here's an idea for you:
A guy meets a mad scientist, and gets sent into the past to meet his parents.
Here's something a hell of a lot more than just an idea for you:
http://us.imdb.com/Details?0088763
Back to the Future.
Ideas ain't worth shit by themselves. And you're kidding yourself if you think that a song is an "idea we all agree on".
This is why Microsoft collects patents. It's not to litigate against other companies (although the conspiracy-theory, marijuana paranoia fueled guys will claim otherwise)... it's to get them out of holes like this.
They can now turn around and tell said company "Hey, we might infringe this one... but you infringe this one, this one, oh! and this one".
One cross-patent licensing deal later, and everyone's happy.
Movies don't grow on trees.
Heck, at the moment I'm working on a 35 minute long short film. No-budget. Cutting corners as much as possible, and it's still going to cost (by the time it's all done and finished) about $45,000.
And that's for just me, using existing locations, paying as few people as possible, and relying on a lot of goodwill because, well, people want to make movies.
Start talking about high production values, and you quickly shoot up into the millions. One feature film idea I have will cost around $7MM to shoot, give or take. And that's before you worry about paying for 'stars'. That's just the cost of getting it from A to B.
It's not easy, involves hundreds of people, and costs a lot of money. Do you actually have any idea how much a "million" is worth these days? Your average company (startup, tech, whatever) of 10 people will survive for a year on a million dollars. It's not much money for a lot of people - for an individual who wants to sit on their ass and go to the Bahamas for the rest of their lives? Sure.