GPLed programs come with - I quote - "ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY." Check out sections 11 and 12 of the the file COPYING in the GNUCash source distribution.
An audio CD player costs a few hundred dollars, as does a DVD player. But it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace an LP collection with audio CDs or a video cassette collection with DVDs, and this within a span of only a decade or two. Are we willing to burden our personal libraries (and our institutional libraries) of books, music, and films with such costs in order to make a technology transition every decade or two in order to satisfy the economic models of the content industries? And to lose some precious, but perhaps not widely popular, works with each technology transition because they are not made available using the new technology? Do we have, and will we continue to have, the rights and ability to preserve content that we have already acquired in the face of changing technology? For existing materials the answer isn't entirely clear. We certainly have the ability, but the legal rights of consumers and institutions such as libraries are less clear. In a future world of license agreements and digital rights management technology governed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, both rights and capabilities are questionable.
As someone else has already said, we can read printed material that is hundreds, or even thousands of years old. Should would-be content controllers start applying their pay-per-view-we-own-it-you-don't mindset to books, they shouldn't be surprised when it doesn't sell.
It's not like the record labels are robbing you of some fundamental right--it's a luxury item people.
The problem is the record companies go beyond mere packaging to interfere with people's rights to use recording technology in whatever way they see fit. Examples are:
the tax on blank media that already assumes you're doing unauthorised copying - whether you are or not
the killing of DAT
the CPRM initiative
Personally, I think CD prices are ridiculous. The problem is there is no alternative. As new technology emerged which promised efficient ways of distributing music, did the record companies embrace it? Of course not - they slapped it down with armies of lawyers. For the record, they still have yet to come up with an alternative. Reason: control. The CD is as equally friendly to control as all its predecessors.
I should also point out that one of the biggest achievements in the fight against Church power was the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther gave the people an alternative to the Church, and that opened the floodgates of pent-up frustration and dissatisfaction. Suddenly, there were choices that had never existed before.
Absolutely correct. The Reformation followed two huge changes in society:
literacy - people could read the Bible and other works in their own language for the first time without having it dispensed to them from the (often corrupt) pulpit; and
trade. The vast quantities of money extracted by Rome could be better used for economic gain once people could make up their own minds whether compulsory church taxes were a noble cause or not.
But I would say that the enabler for the Reformation was technological. It was the printing press that allowed people to read the Bible and commentaries on it in their own language and decide for themselves instead of letting Rome decide for them. I read somewhere that Martin Luther himself was responsible for nearly half of all sales of published works in Germany during his lifetime.
The modern parallel to the printing press is of course the Internet. To follow your example, it's easy to see what the most popular activity is on the Net: communicating with other people directly. Whether it's IRC or e-mail or chat forums or Slashdot, people prefer to use the Net to interact with other people more than they do to buy stuff or interact with corporations. But that's another topic altogether...
"They quarantined our samples Mr Ambassador! Should we dispense with the biological warfare route and try a full scale invasion instead? We could always pretend to come in peace..."
then why are we seeing these panicky reactions from Microsoft? You know - Gates and Ballmer flip-flopping, Allchin, Mundie. If they were really confident about the future there would be little need to fly kites all the time about OSS or the GPL.
I suspect Microsoft is actually deeply worried about the next five years. The top execs know only too well just what IBM looked like to the business press in 1989 - and how quickly they fell from a position of seeming invincibility. The margins in the packaged software business are falling rapidly. Unix server revenues are nearly triple Windows server revenues - and Linux is cleaning their clocks at the low end. To move away from the software license model means going the services route - a la.NET which is untested and a big gamble to say the least.
Unlike the heyday of fawning which accompanied Microsoft in the mid-90s, businesses are becoming very hard-nosed about security, privacy and robustness - especially as more businesses integrate Internet functionality into their business models. Most are deeply disturbed at the idea of a middleware layer of services controlled solely by Microsoft and won't be very keen to move there.
Gracenote have obviously realised that this story has generated large amounts of negative press for them. So they issue what must be one of the finest pieces of damage control PR I've ever seen. It carefully emphasises what a wonderful service they have and how reasonable their charges are, given how much value they add. There is no mention - no I lie, there is one mention about how the data is user-inputted - but that's drowned in a paragraph or two of how they clean up the data and license album covers and so forth.
Although the raw data is user submitted, the
storage, retrieval, categorization, and organization of the database, the access
interface, and the matching and filtering methods are absolutely proprietary, and
we will do what is necessary to defend this intellectual property.
Including suing someone who want to switch to a free alternative? Not mentioned.
Most of our developer partners understand our need to defray our costs, and
don't demand that we provide our service for free. They also know that even if
they had free access at one point in time it doesn't mean that they are guaranteed
free access in perpetuity, at our expense.
But of course, if they want access to a free service without paying our expenses, then hell, we'd better get after them.
See how it works kids? Your average suit who needs to worry about business and that kind of stuff will read this excellent piece of spin-doctoring and wonder what all the hullabaloo is about. I reckon this letter cost them a fortune to draw up.
In fact, they thought there wasn't enough work to go around, so they kicked me off. I said, "Look, if you want me to come back you have to let me be in charge. But this is a dangerous thing, because if you put me in charge this time, I'm going to want to be in charge forever after."
I don't think that desire has diminished one smidgen with time...
I expect to read soon that that Harry Fox Agency will start cracking down on jam sessions because guys share lyric sheets and show each other popular licks.
I would genuinely like to know just what successes there have been against obvious greed by a corporation in the courts over the last eighteen months or so. I define success as something along the lines of: an impartial judge considers the facts of the case and what implications his or her judgement would have and then tells the corporate entity bringing the action to go and stick it.
Do you guys get that over there occasionally? Can you get rid of judges who are clueless? Do you have any frigging say in the way your country is run at all?
Points well taken but I think you're thinking in the terms of the current state of the industry. It's very difficult to look around and then make confident predictions of the future of recorded music. This new license is (I think) designed to be future-proof. Just as the GPL has survived nearly 20 years as a vehicle for licensing free software, so the Open Audio License is designed to be around for a long time - much longer, I suspect than the record companies in their present form.
Think back to ~1984 when the GPL was first written (someone correct me please if necessary) and note the state of the industry. Now do the same thing with the Open Audio license and project 20 years.
Re:From South Africa? Ha! ha! ha!
on
Fission in a Box
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· Score: 2
In related news, Toronto residents are up in arms about a natural reactor that has been discovered in Mexico. "The presence of this dangerous site means Toronto residents should be concerned about radiation and water contamination," said Jenny Activist, local spokesperson for the Toronto Against Radiation (TAR) movement. "None of us want future generations to be mutants due to high levels of radiation."
When it was pointed out to her that Toronto was as far away from Mexico as South Africa is from Gabon, she said "Oh."
Re:From South Africa? Ha! ha! ha!
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 2
It's funny that the proposal comes from South Africa, because there were quite a few natural nuclear ractors nearby, such as in Oklo , in Gabon.
Nearby is relative. Oklo is as far away from South Africa as Denver is from New York City. Plus there's the inconvenience of two conflicts in the way if you want to go by land - the DRC and Angola.
Do we believe we can defeat any audio protection scheme? Certainly, the technical details of any scheme will become known publicly through reverse engineering. Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may not be
strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.
All the criteria are filled: it pisses off the AckAcks, has strong backing in working code and best of all, reads like your average/. post on the subject...
The regilding of the angel is perhaps a fitting
analogy to what is happening only a stone's throw away from the cathedral at Lionhead Studios, the new startup of PC gaming's "It Boy," 41-year-old Peter Molyneux.
41-year old? I thought he was in his late fifties. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Initial tests of flying aircraft by computer had poor results. In a non fly-by-wire aircraft - be it helicopter or fixed wing - the pilot can feel what the vehicle is doing at all times by placing his (or her - hi Jane:) hands on the controls. You can't feel that when computers are added to the equation.
Add in software to control some aspect of flight and the pilot is automatically "further away" from the craft he's aviating. It sounds obvious and I'm not going so far as to say that computer-controlled systems are evil in and of themselves, but it's an aspect of modern flight where the negatives are often overlooked.
I've seen compelling evidence that another layer on top of the data that the plot must interpret is a Bad Thing. Anything that changes the pitch of a chopper's rotors other than your left hand on the collective should be viewed with extreme caution IMHO.
What made Kubrick the genius was his NON-use of sound. He realized that it was silence that caused tension.
Oh yeah. No question. But I think the scariest use of sounds in the Shining is audible: the noise that Danny's tricycle makes when it crosses the carpets on the floor.
Well that and his angles of photography. You can always tell what is a Kubrick movie. To me that is the sign of a true genius.
To use the same example, the Steadicam shots of the tricycle tend to make you feel you're the one pedalling around the Overlook.
Slashdot Mirror
McGee also designed the nailguns - excellent single-player weapons and vastly underestimated for multiplayer too.
Shh!
...I tried adjusting Galahad's belt and this tinny voice said "There's nothing wrong with THAT!"
Windows analysis - SHLOCK Count Method
5:11pm - Saving from http://www.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.2.80/vl c-0.2.80.tar.bz2
at 0,1 k/s
GPLed programs come with - I quote - "ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY." Check out sections 11 and 12 of the the file COPYING in the GNUCash source distribution.
As someone else has already said, we can read printed material that is hundreds, or even thousands of years old. Should would-be content controllers start applying their pay-per-view-we-own-it-you-don't mindset to books, they shouldn't be surprised when it doesn't sell.
The problem is the record companies go beyond mere packaging to interfere with people's rights to use recording technology in whatever way they see fit. Examples are:
- the tax on blank media that already assumes you're doing unauthorised copying - whether you are or not
- the killing of DAT
- the CPRM initiative
Personally, I think CD prices are ridiculous. The problem is there is no alternative. As new technology emerged which promised efficient ways of distributing music, did the record companies embrace it? Of course not - they slapped it down with armies of lawyers. For the record, they still have yet to come up with an alternative. Reason: control. The CD is as equally friendly to control as all its predecessors.Absolutely correct. The Reformation followed two huge changes in society:
- literacy - people could read the Bible and other works in their own language for the first time without having it dispensed to them from the (often corrupt) pulpit; and
- trade. The vast quantities of money extracted by Rome could be better used for economic gain once people could make up their own minds whether compulsory church taxes were a noble cause or not.
But I would say that the enabler for the Reformation was technological. It was the printing press that allowed people to read the Bible and commentaries on it in their own language and decide for themselves instead of letting Rome decide for them. I read somewhere that Martin Luther himself was responsible for nearly half of all sales of published works in Germany during his lifetime.The modern parallel to the printing press is of course the Internet. To follow your example, it's easy to see what the most popular activity is on the Net: communicating with other people directly. Whether it's IRC or e-mail or chat forums or Slashdot, people prefer to use the Net to interact with other people more than they do to buy stuff or interact with corporations. But that's another topic altogether...
"They quarantined our samples Mr Ambassador! Should we dispense with the biological warfare route and try a full scale invasion instead? We could always pretend to come in peace..."
I suspect Microsoft is actually deeply worried about the next five years. The top execs know only too well just what IBM looked like to the business press in 1989 - and how quickly they fell from a position of seeming invincibility. The margins in the packaged software business are falling rapidly. Unix server revenues are nearly triple Windows server revenues - and Linux is cleaning their clocks at the low end. To move away from the software license model means going the services route - a la .NET which is untested and a big gamble to say the least.
Unlike the heyday of fawning which accompanied Microsoft in the mid-90s, businesses are becoming very hard-nosed about security, privacy and robustness - especially as more businesses integrate Internet functionality into their business models. Most are deeply disturbed at the idea of a middleware layer of services controlled solely by Microsoft and won't be very keen to move there.
Sierra, for example, which first gained prominence through family-friendly adventure games..
Like Leisure Suit Larry?
Although the raw data is user submitted, the storage, retrieval, categorization, and organization of the database, the access interface, and the matching and filtering methods are absolutely proprietary, and we will do what is necessary to defend this intellectual property.
Including suing someone who want to switch to a free alternative? Not mentioned.
Most of our developer partners understand our need to defray our costs, and don't demand that we provide our service for free. They also know that even if they had free access at one point in time it doesn't mean that they are guaranteed free access in perpetuity, at our expense.
But of course, if they want access to a free service without paying our expenses, then hell, we'd better get after them.
See how it works kids? Your average suit who needs to worry about business and that kind of stuff will read this excellent piece of spin-doctoring and wonder what all the hullabaloo is about. I reckon this letter cost them a fortune to draw up.
In fact, they thought there wasn't enough work to go around, so they kicked me off. I said, "Look, if you want me to come back you have to let me be in charge. But this is a dangerous thing, because if you put me in charge this time, I'm going to want to be in charge forever after."
I don't think that desire has diminished one smidgen with time...
I would genuinely like to know just what successes there have been against obvious greed by a corporation in the courts over the last eighteen months or so. I define success as something along the lines of: an impartial judge considers the facts of the case and what implications his or her judgement would have and then tells the corporate entity bringing the action to go and stick it.
Do you guys get that over there occasionally? Can you get rid of judges who are clueless? Do you have any frigging say in the way your country is run at all?
Think back to ~1984 when the GPL was first written (someone correct me please if necessary) and note the state of the industry. Now do the same thing with the Open Audio license and project 20 years.
When it was pointed out to her that Toronto was as far away from Mexico as South Africa is from Gabon, she said "Oh."
Nearby is relative. Oklo is as far away from South Africa as Denver is from New York City. Plus there's the inconvenience of two conflicts in the way if you want to go by land - the DRC and Angola.
Do we believe we can defeat any audio protection scheme? Certainly, the technical details of any scheme will become known publicly through reverse engineering. Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may not be strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.
All the criteria are filled: it pisses off the AckAcks, has strong backing in working code and best of all, reads like your average /. post on the subject...
41-year old? I thought he was in his late fifties. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Add in software to control some aspect of flight and the pilot is automatically "further away" from the craft he's aviating. It sounds obvious and I'm not going so far as to say that computer-controlled systems are evil in and of themselves, but it's an aspect of modern flight where the negatives are often overlooked.
I've seen compelling evidence that another layer on top of the data that the plot must interpret is a Bad Thing. Anything that changes the pitch of a chopper's rotors other than your left hand on the collective should be viewed with extreme caution IMHO.
Oh yeah. No question. But I think the scariest use of sounds in the Shining is audible: the noise that Danny's tricycle makes when it crosses the carpets on the floor.
Well that and his angles of photography. You can always tell what is a Kubrick movie. To me that is the sign of a true genius.
To use the same example, the Steadicam shots of the tricycle tend to make you feel you're the one pedalling around the Overlook.
Point taken. It just looked like it was written in Intercal and I didn't want to give the impression that I was reading it too closely for tips...
Yes, that is a real lion.