If individuals don't trust Microsoft, MS can bang their heads against the wall making their OS less buggy and more stable, to no avail.
Exactly. One of the important questions that's making much of the world look at open software is: "Do you want your data to be under the control of proprietary software from a giant American corporation?"
As people around the world become more familiar with computers and their security issues, this is slowly turning into a winning argument.
It's especially effective if you have a collection of the past horror stories of Microsoft spyware sending the contents of your disk back to some internal.microsoft.com site.
This isn't just a Microsoft problem, of course. It's a problem with any software for which you can't get the source and compile it yourself.
Linux is as much about being Communist, as is the phrase, "of the people, by the people, and for the people".
Heh. I wonder why the linux crowd hasn't used "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in its PR yet? Or have they, and I just haven't noticed it?
Most big business's were complaining that Dell's over seas tech support was a farce and demanded english speaking tech support reps that new the nomenclature of IT.
Funny; I've heard a related but different explanation for the exodus of programming jobs: We have to farm out most of the development to other countries, because most of the world doesn't speak English very well, and you can't develop software in the US that works in any language but English.
Actually, my response to this tends to confuse them. I argue that there's no problem finding people in the US who can handle other languages. The problem is that American management is generally contemptuous of foreign languages, and won't support development of UIs in any other language.
This is based mostly on personal experience. I'm not fluent in any other language, but I know several well enough that I could produce a UI in them. And I have the sense to ask native speakers for criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (And I know how to find the native speakers.;-)
But when I've suggested such things at work, the response invariably is to simply pretend that I didn't make such a pointless suggestion, and go on discussing important topics.
There is a common belief among Americans (and which is rampant in American management), that the rest of the world is learning English, so there's no need of any other language.
One of the real frustrations with working in the US is the difficulty of making even 8859-1 work correctly. Thus, I have guest accounts on machines in Finland and Sweden. When I copy files to my Mac Powerbook (using rsync or tar), the marked letters in the file names often come out garbled. When I copy a directory back, those garbled names appear on the remote machines. Macs sold in Scandinavia seem to work fine. But no amount of digging around in Help or FAQ or mailing lists seems to come up with anything that works for my machine. I'd have to recommend that if you want to develop something that works in Finnish or Swedish, you should not use a machine sold in the US market. (Windows machines are even worse, with their bizarre file-name transformations, though I must say that stuff that I develop on linux and *BSD machines seem to work fine when copied to Finland or Sweden.)
Computers are becoming common all over the world, and we really need UIs in whatever languages the customers speak. It should be no surprise at all that software development is moving out of the English-only American enclave.
linux (with OSX a close second); Mini Cooper; Mini Cooper (except that my wife gets to drive it more because I'm doing mostly telecommuting work from home;-)
... if MS got into there, that would be money coming into America, and thus taxed.
Since when does Microsoft pay taxes?
Heh. Actually, they have paid some US taxes, though there have been a few stories (some mentioned here) about the IRS starting an investigation of MS's tax records for the past N years.
But this probably isn't relevant fo the Iraq story. MS would almost certainly launder any income there in such a way that none of it qualifies as income/profit under US laws. Like the other big corporations do routinely.
Anyway, if you did RTFA, you'd note the comment that has been reported a few other places: Despite having a US-enforced near-monopoly on software sales in Iraq now (since things like linux and *BSD are terrorist tools;-), MS has in fact sold almost nothing. People buy computer hardware cheap from importers that get them directly from Asia. They install software from the CD sellers down on the street for the equivalent of about $1 per CD. Even if there were an attempt to enforce any "IP" laws, it wouldn't matter, because hardly anyone there can afford commercial software prices. Any why would you pay such prices when the software is available cheap from the local vendors?
The main benefit to MS is to get their software in use, so that it's the only thing that Iraqi users know. When and if things become more stable and copyright laws can be enforced, they can start hitting the country up for license fees.
It's your standard drug-dealer approach. Let them have the software for free now. When they're addicted and can't think of switching to a different drug, you can really profit. The important thing now is to make sure that the competition can't get in and turn it into some sort of free market.
It's hardly anything that originated with billg and co. Or with American corporations. Part of the hatred of Westerners in much of the world comes from the days of the British Empire. Much of the commerce was controlled by corporations with Crown Charters that gave them monopolies in the colonies. Locals were routinely fined or jailed (or worse) for attempting to set up businesses in competition with such corporations. This approach is a serious drain on the local society, and historically has produced some very long memories (and hatred) in much of the world.
In any case, the OSS crowd does have an opportunity here. It may be true that MS software is available in Iraq cheap right now. But the Iraqi population is one of the best-educated in the Middle East, and they can easily understand the threat. The approach is obvious: If you buy pirated MS software, you'll be facing serious legal and economic threats in the forseeable future. With "open" software, the similar CDs come with no future threat. They aren't "pirated" copies; they are legal copies that you can install and use without any obligation to a giant corporation. And, since the source is easily available, you can have your people study the code. You can develop your own software development and support operations. And it's all legal.
After decades of Ba'ath rule, this approach should get the attention of a lot of Iraqis.
... what Iraq needs before anything else at the moment is a stable government.
Well, one way not to get stability is to turn over the computing infrastructure to another big American corporation that made big contributions to Bush's election campaign. It doesn't take a deep understanding of politics to realize where that approach leads.
Guess which big computer corporation was a big contributor...
... until some troll mods up Celine Dion and Bryan Adams...
Heh. Funny thing: Recently I heard (on NPR of all places) a track that someone had done by removing the atrocious instrumental backup on a Christina Aguilera song, and replacing it with their own - very sparse - instrumental. It was really nice. She can actually sing. You just can't tell on her recordings, because of how the recording company fscks it up.
I wonder if the coming changes will give other awful pop stars a chance to show that they really can make good music when freed of the big recording labels?
Maybe Apple doesn't make any money on their music store. But the record companies basically get a free distribution system and extra profit at no expense.
And there's an elephant lurking unseen in the corner, to abuse an obvious metaphor.
Apple isn't making money from the iTunes store because the recording companies claim all most of the money. And they don't pass it on to the musicians.
This is very likely doomed. Apple has to be talking to unsigned musicians and small local recording shops. Once iTunes gets really well established, Apple will simply start signing the musicians themselves, and thumb their noses at the recording companies.
They can't do this now, because they need to list the commercial music to work up market share. If Apple had started with unknown musicians, they wouldn't get market share. So they play nice with the recording labels, for a while.
But consider: A couple months ago, I helped a couple of friends make their own CD. They are "unknowns", except in a non-commercial sort of music (which I happen to play as well). So they used a local recording studio to do the recording. They own the master CDs outright. They did a CD run through a local shop, and are distributing it themselves, by word of mouth, personal connections, and a web site. The people who like their kind of music really like the CD, and they'll probably pay off the expenses in a few more weeks.
Suppose Apple were to offer them a deal: List their 24 tracks with iTunes, and split the money, say $.50 for Apple and $.49 for the musicians.
I think they'd jump at it. They still have the CDs. But listing on iTunes would bring in money, unlike signing with a major label. This was done somewhat as a lark, so any income is basically frosting on the cake (to abuse another metaphor).
Meanwhile, there are all those zillions of other good but unknown musicians all around the world. Most of them would never be signed with the major labels, because their music isn't commercial.
But suppose Steve Jobs offered them the same sort of deal. "Use your local recording studio to make your album; give us copies; we'll sell them and give you half the money." The cost to Apple is just the storage and a little management. They pay for this with the first couple of sales, and the rest is profit. The musicians take a bit longer to pay for studio time, but after 100 sales or so, they're getting income from it.
Ya gotta expect that the Apple folks are looking ahead to this.
And we can hope that the future lies with the online distributors who give the musicians a good share of the money.
Here in the US, the typical citizen can't be bothered to distinguish between Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and even Indians.
I have heard a useful perspective on this from a number of Chinese immigrant friends. They all like to comment that, bad as it might be, American racism is nothing compared to Asian racism. While being quite aware of the way that most white Americans see them, they comment that American racists are much easier to deal with than the racists they've known in Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, Japan, or even other parts of China.
One thesis I've heard is that at least the American racists know that they're wrong. This doesn't stop them, of course, and they will rarely admit their racism even to themselves. But at least they have subconscious feelings of guilt. My Chinese friends seem to think this is something unusual, since in their experience, racism is open and unapologetic wherever they came from.
Well, at least they have a sense of humor about it all.
It might be effective if we were to start seeing headlines attributing the actions of some US corporation to "Americans". How would American geeks respond to being tossed into the same bin as Microsoft's marketing people or SCO's lawyers?
"Americans sue teenagers and grandmothers for sharing music."
"Americans say that the GPL violates copyright laws."
"Americans threaten companies that use Finnish linux operating system."
For several decades, engineers have been suggesting that we dam the Straight of Gibraltar. This would have to be a rather large dam, of course, but it is well within the feasible range.
Such a dam would be fairly thick, and putting a road and/or a railway on top would be part of the design.
But the main argument for doing it is that there's a good net flow into the Mediterranean through the straight. A dam would cause the water level to start dropping. After a couple of decades, it would be the world's most powerful generator of electricity.
This would cause the shoreline to move out considerably in a lot of countries. But it would solve Venice's problem of slowly sinking into the mud. Venice would be high and dry, unless they built a ring of dykes to hold river water.
An addendum to the proposal is to dam the Bosporus. This would cause the Mediterranean sea level to drop faster, while preserving the level of the Black Sea. And it would eventually provide more electricity.
In both cases, there is also the large amount of shipping to deal with. But that would just mean a set of locks comparable to what we already have in the Suez and Panama canals.
It's also interesting to consider the effect of a major earthquake or terrorist bomb after the level of the Mediterranean has dropped 100 meters or so...
I tend to use HTML.... It fits easily on a disk, it's easy to add graphics, you've got a full-screen mode on every browser, and when you're done, it can go on a website without making you look like an idiot...
And, most important, the web pages can contain hyperlinks. Then those who want just the idiot level can look at the main pages, while those who want actual information can start clicking and get all the detailed pages that you have included to support your top-level pages.
And, of course, the presentation and any handouts should prominently display the URL, for the benefit of the non-idiots in the audience.
On the contrary, the files do contain "content" (i.e., characters), and that content is almost certainly copyrighted. It's just not the music. But pretty nearly any string of bytes can be copyrighted. AT&T even claims a copyright on a blank line...
Well, if it contains the descriptive info from tracks, this could be a very useful addition to any ripper. The problem is that the CDDB doesn't seem to contain anything other than the title of a track. There's none of the usual info (tune composer, people playing, instruments, where they learned the tune, etc.) that ever shows up. This info is also missing from iTunes, which also shows you just the track title.
If there's an online DB giving the "liner notes" on the track, maybe we can get this info onto our disks next to the MP3 or ogg of the music.
I for one, welcome any source of info about the music that I'm "stealing" (i.e., putting into a form that I can play on my own equipment). It'd be real handy when I want to, say, make my own cover of a song or perform it at a paying gig, and I'd like to contact its owners for permission. When they hide this info from me, I either don't use the music, or I use it without the proper permissions and attributions because I can't find them.
In particular, this is another case where the law merely requires that Open Source be considered.
You know you're in a pretty sorry state when you need laws that force your government to even look at more than a single source of something.
Unfortunately, such laws are all too often needed. Otherwise the contracts usually go to whoever has done the best job of greasing palms. And, of course, such greasing is always easiest for the biggest player(s).
Well, maybe. But this time, the arrogant world leader who holds the rest of us in contempt is the American president. If history repeats, then the US is in for a big loss of empire.
The recent history of giving "friendly" corporations the big contract in Iraq (and enforcing it with troops) is a pretty good parallel to the British actions that brought on the Boston Tea Party.
So maybe that history is repeating itself, with the names changed.
So what deep, dark secrets does the NSF have to protect?
Aren't they one of the agencies that pretty much publicizes nearly everything they do? Yeah, I suppose some of their funding discussions are kept quiet until they make a decision. But then the results (and much of the reasoning) are put online for anyone to read.
Now if we could just make the rest of the government open and accountable...
If there are different forks, it does not matter. A company will pick one that does what they require and they provides good support from an organization they trust.
In my experience, what often happens is: A company (i.e., a small group within the company) picks an app that does most of what they need, with the expectation of having the missing parts Real Soon Now.
With proprietary software, getting the missing parts means trying to persuade the vendor to implement them. This can take a long time, unless you have a LOT of money as a persuader.
With open-source software, all you need is a few programmers. They do their own fork, to get the features that the company needs. If you don't have a programming staff, you can contract it out. In any case, you end up with your own version of the software that does what you want.
If you sell it, the GPL will require that you share your extensions with the world. But, contrary to what the theorists seem to think, I've found that managers hardly ever have objections to this. All you have to do is mention the possibility that some user will spot a problem and fix it themselves.
So I submit the changes to the keepers of the open source -- and in most cases, they are rejected on the grounds that they are too specific to that one company's situation. Or only some of the changes are accepted. In either case, the company still has its own "fork" with added features that are specific to its needs.
This is all based on the idea that a company either has its own programming staff, or contracts out the job as needed. This is quite common, and getting to be more so as the entire world goes computerized and networked.
We could discuss whether such things are truly cases of "forking". They are usually more like small side branches. But it's the way things often work. And it works best with open source.
Closed-source: it's about money Open-source: it's about ego
Often true, but not always. I'm personally involved with several for which the main motivation is:
Open-source: It's about functionality.
Thus, as a musician, I had always pretty much ignored the commercial music-editing packages, because each one only works on one kind of system. If I can't email a tune to some friends, because they don't have the same software on the same system, why would I bother?
Then, a few years back, the "abc" music notation came along. Plain text that you can read. Small files that you can email. Neat software that runs on nearly every machine to convert to PS and MIDI. One of the best programs (abc2ps) is open source and produces PS output that looks better than 99% of published music.
The people involved are very low-ego about it. They are musicians who happen to be programmers. And, not being publishers, they shared most of what they have done. A few have a very small ($20 or $30) "shareware" charge; most are free (as in both beer and speech).
However, there has been a lot of forking of abc2ps. The reason is that the first releases were somewhat basic, and really only handled fake-book type transcriptions. It was very good at that, but lacked a way to represent a lot of other kinds of printed music. Then the author announced that he was getting far too busy with his job (math prof), and wouldn't be making many more changes, so others were encouraged to take his code and extend it.
I and several others started adding our favorite missing features. There has been a bit of merging (and sharing of patches). But there has been less of this than you might think. The reason is that different kinds of music have very different notational needs. A feature that I find mandatory for the music that I play often gets a "Who the hell needs something that bizarre?" reaction from other musicians. But they really need something else that I never use.
So, like all the other forkers, I have a list of features, ordered by what I consider their priority. I've implemented most of the top N things on my list. At some point, playing music has a higher preference than hacking some features that I don't need. So those features stay on the to-do list.
Merging the various lines turns out to be somewhat difficult. Each of the forks has required some significant extensions to the parser and the data structures. Simple merges aren't possible; you have to go through the diffs carefully and figure out how to handle the overlaps. But we mostly consider playing music a higher priority, so the merges don't often happen.
Another use of open source: Like many long-term programmers, I have a directory full of useful tools, mostly somewhat small. I keep them online, and of course others sometimes grab them and use them. Sometimes I get nice letters saying how useful some tool has been. And occasionally I get a patch (or a complete copy) of someone's extended version. But not all that often.
This isn't at all objectionable. When I fetch a tool of my own to use on some new project, I often modify it for that project's needs. I usually don't merge the changes back, because they aren't general enough to look useful in the future. No big deal. My online tools are really more like prototypes, "Here's how you can do that" examples. They're more useful as basic, clean examples than as programs that do everything for everyone. Forking of such things is desirable; merging back the changes is only sometimes useful.
Now I think I'll go practice some tunes for some upcoming events...
I might be a little cynical but could it just be the NHS trying to get a better deal from MS?
You are being cynical, but there's a lot of truth to it, at least when you are talking to administrative bean counters.
OTOH, behind the scenes there is a lot of talk about Microsoft's long history of spyware. Many countries are getting stricter about who is allowed to access medical data. Installing binary-only software is starting to pop up a lot of red flags in the operations area. How do you know that the software isn't sending all your patient data back to headquarters? Simple answer: You don't. And with Microsoft's history, the rational guess is that their software probably does contain hooks that lets Microsoft people get at all your data whenever they want.
Of course, it's not just Microsoft. This is true of any binary-only software from any vendor. We pick on Microsoft because they've been caught red-handed so often. But any knowledgeable operations people dealing with medical computers are going to be very suspicious of any closed-source software.
What I'd wonder is why they're only talking about linux. I'd think that several of the *BSDs would be every bit as good. And they can run most linux software, especially if you take the sensible approach of compiling everything yourself. So considering only linux seems a bit short-sighted.
the paper actually talks about them putting a searchable front-end to the results online but then says they decided not to,
Well, that's a disappointment. In the past, when the monthly announcements that crypt has been broken appear, I've generally responded by sending them my/etc/passwd entry and asking them to tell me my password. So far, nobody has ever done so.
If these guys could tell me my password given the encrypted string from the 2nd field, then I'd be impressed. Until then, I'll just take it as another entry in the very long list of claims that crypt has been broken.
But it would be interesting to ask him how many of those quotes from him have actually been original, and how many he got from other people.
Not that this should diminish our respect for his sense of humor, of course. As the leader of the Open Source gang, you'd expect him to use other people's jokes. But when asked, he should tell you where he found the ones that he didn't think up himself.
We should also consider whether some can be improved. Thus the "marriage" quip would work as a rejoinder to all those people who think that money is the only valid motivator. We need a version of it that doesn't refer to Darl McBride, and that covers the general case.
And perhaps we need an Open-Source Humor Project to collect such humor in an online archive, so that it can be improved by everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
If individuals don't trust Microsoft, MS can bang their heads against the wall making their OS less buggy and more stable, to no avail.
.microsoft.com site.
Exactly. One of the important questions that's making much of the world look at open software is: "Do you want your data to be under the control of proprietary software from a giant American corporation?"
As people around the world become more familiar with computers and their security issues, this is slowly turning into a winning argument.
It's especially effective if you have a collection of the past horror stories of Microsoft spyware sending the contents of your disk back to some internal
This isn't just a Microsoft problem, of course. It's a problem with any software for which you can't get the source and compile it yourself.
Linux is as much about being Communist, as is the phrase, "of the people, by the people, and for the people".
...
Heh. I wonder why the linux crowd hasn't used "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in its PR yet? Or have they, and I just haven't noticed it?
Of course, I did notice this sig
Yeah, and while we're at it, let's fix Tux's beak so he looks more like a penguin. ;-)
Most big business's were complaining that Dell's over seas tech support was a farce and demanded english speaking tech support reps that new the nomenclature of IT.
;-)
Funny; I've heard a related but different explanation for the exodus of programming jobs: We have to farm out most of the development to other countries, because most of the world doesn't speak English very well, and you can't develop software in the US that works in any language but English.
Actually, my response to this tends to confuse them. I argue that there's no problem finding people in the US who can handle other languages. The problem is that American management is generally contemptuous of foreign languages, and won't support development of UIs in any other language.
This is based mostly on personal experience. I'm not fluent in any other language, but I know several well enough that I could produce a UI in them. And I have the sense to ask native speakers for criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (And I know how to find the native speakers.
But when I've suggested such things at work, the response invariably is to simply pretend that I didn't make such a pointless suggestion, and go on discussing important topics.
There is a common belief among Americans (and which is rampant in American management), that the rest of the world is learning English, so there's no need of any other language.
One of the real frustrations with working in the US is the difficulty of making even 8859-1 work correctly. Thus, I have guest accounts on machines in Finland and Sweden. When I copy files to my Mac Powerbook (using rsync or tar), the marked letters in the file names often come out garbled. When I copy a directory back, those garbled names appear on the remote machines. Macs sold in Scandinavia seem to work fine. But no amount of digging around in Help or FAQ or mailing lists seems to come up with anything that works for my machine. I'd have to recommend that if you want to develop something that works in Finnish or Swedish, you should not use a machine sold in the US market. (Windows machines are even worse, with their bizarre file-name transformations, though I must say that stuff that I develop on linux and *BSD machines seem to work fine when copied to Finland or Sweden.)
Computers are becoming common all over the world, and we really need UIs in whatever languages the customers speak. It should be no surprise at all that software development is moving out of the English-only American enclave.
linux (with OSX a close second); Mini Cooper; Mini Cooper (except that my wife gets to drive it more because I'm doing mostly telecommuting work from home ;-)
Since when does Microsoft pay taxes?
Heh. Actually, they have paid some US taxes, though there have been a few stories (some mentioned here) about the IRS starting an investigation of MS's tax records for the past N years.
But this probably isn't relevant fo the Iraq story. MS would almost certainly launder any income there in such a way that none of it qualifies as income/profit under US laws. Like the other big corporations do routinely.
Anyway, if you did RTFA, you'd note the comment that has been reported a few other places: Despite having a US-enforced near-monopoly on software sales in Iraq now (since things like linux and *BSD are terrorist tools
The main benefit to MS is to get their software in use, so that it's the only thing that Iraqi users know. When and if things become more stable and copyright laws can be enforced, they can start hitting the country up for license fees.
It's your standard drug-dealer approach. Let them have the software for free now. When they're addicted and can't think of switching to a different drug, you can really profit. The important thing now is to make sure that the competition can't get in and turn it into some sort of free market.
It's hardly anything that originated with billg and co. Or with American corporations. Part of the hatred of Westerners in much of the world comes from the days of the British Empire. Much of the commerce was controlled by corporations with Crown Charters that gave them monopolies in the colonies. Locals were routinely fined or jailed (or worse) for attempting to set up businesses in competition with such corporations. This approach is a serious drain on the local society, and historically has produced some very long memories (and hatred) in much of the world.
In any case, the OSS crowd does have an opportunity here. It may be true that MS software is available in Iraq cheap right now. But the Iraqi population is one of the best-educated in the Middle East, and they can easily understand the threat. The approach is obvious: If you buy pirated MS software, you'll be facing serious legal and economic threats in the forseeable future. With "open" software, the similar CDs come with no future threat. They aren't "pirated" copies; they are legal copies that you can install and use without any obligation to a giant corporation. And, since the source is easily available, you can have your people study the code. You can develop your own software development and support operations. And it's all legal.
After decades of Ba'ath rule, this approach should get the attention of a lot of Iraqis.
... what Iraq needs before anything else at the moment is a stable government.
...
Well, one way not to get stability is to turn over the computing infrastructure to another big American corporation that made big contributions to Bush's election campaign. It doesn't take a deep understanding of politics to realize where that approach leads.
Guess which big computer corporation was a big contributor
... until some troll mods up Celine Dion and Bryan Adams...
Heh. Funny thing: Recently I heard (on NPR of all places) a track that someone had done by removing the atrocious instrumental backup on a Christina Aguilera song, and replacing it with their own - very sparse - instrumental. It was really nice. She can actually sing. You just can't tell on her recordings, because of how the recording company fscks it up.
I wonder if the coming changes will give other awful pop stars a chance to show that they really can make good music when freed of the big recording labels?
Maybe Apple doesn't make any money on their music store. But the record companies basically get a free distribution system and extra profit at no expense.
And there's an elephant lurking unseen in the corner, to abuse an obvious metaphor.
Apple isn't making money from the iTunes store because the recording companies claim all most of the money. And they don't pass it on to the musicians.
This is very likely doomed. Apple has to be talking to unsigned musicians and small local recording shops. Once iTunes gets really well established, Apple will simply start signing the musicians themselves, and thumb their noses at the recording companies.
They can't do this now, because they need to list the commercial music to work up market share. If Apple had started with unknown musicians, they wouldn't get market share. So they play nice with the recording labels, for a while.
But consider: A couple months ago, I helped a couple of friends make their own CD. They are "unknowns", except in a non-commercial sort of music (which I happen to play as well). So they used a local recording studio to do the recording. They own the master CDs outright. They did a CD run through a local shop, and are distributing it themselves, by word of mouth, personal connections, and a web site. The people who like their kind of music really like the CD, and they'll probably pay off the expenses in a few more weeks.
Suppose Apple were to offer them a deal: List their 24 tracks with iTunes, and split the money, say $.50 for Apple and $.49 for the musicians.
I think they'd jump at it. They still have the CDs. But listing on iTunes would bring in money, unlike signing with a major label. This was done somewhat as a lark, so any income is basically frosting on the cake (to abuse another metaphor).
Meanwhile, there are all those zillions of other good but unknown musicians all around the world. Most of them would never be signed with the major labels, because their music isn't commercial.
But suppose Steve Jobs offered them the same sort of deal. "Use your local recording studio to make your album; give us copies; we'll sell them and give you half the money." The cost to Apple is just the storage and a little management. They pay for this with the first couple of sales, and the rest is profit. The musicians take a bit longer to pay for studio time, but after 100 sales or so, they're getting income from it.
Ya gotta expect that the Apple folks are looking ahead to this.
And we can hope that the future lies with the online distributors who give the musicians a good share of the money.
(nuff said)
Nah; we can have fun with this one.
United States of America threatens companies that use the Finnish "linux" operating system.
Anyone else got a headline?
Here in the US, the typical citizen can't be bothered to distinguish between Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and even Indians.
...
I have heard a useful perspective on this from a number of Chinese immigrant friends. They all like to comment that, bad as it might be, American racism is nothing compared to Asian racism. While being quite aware of the way that most white Americans see them, they comment that American racists are much easier to deal with than the racists they've known in Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, Japan, or even other parts of China.
One thesis I've heard is that at least the American racists know that they're wrong. This doesn't stop them, of course, and they will rarely admit their racism even to themselves. But at least they have subconscious feelings of guilt. My Chinese friends seem to think this is something unusual, since in their experience, racism is open and unapologetic wherever they came from.
Well, at least they have a sense of humor about it all.
It might be effective if we were to start seeing headlines attributing the actions of some US corporation to "Americans". How would American geeks respond to being tossed into the same bin as Microsoft's marketing people or SCO's lawyers?
"Americans sue teenagers and grandmothers for sharing music."
"Americans say that the GPL violates copyright laws."
"Americans threaten companies that use Finnish linux operating system."
"Americans capture ex-dictator in Iraq."
Oh; wait
For several decades, engineers have been suggesting that we dam the Straight of Gibraltar. This would have to be a rather large dam, of course, but it is well within the feasible range.
...
Such a dam would be fairly thick, and putting a road and/or a railway on top would be part of the design.
But the main argument for doing it is that there's a good net flow into the Mediterranean through the straight. A dam would cause the water level to start dropping. After a couple of decades, it would be the world's most powerful generator of electricity.
This would cause the shoreline to move out considerably in a lot of countries. But it would solve Venice's problem of slowly sinking into the mud. Venice would be high and dry, unless they built a ring of dykes to hold river water.
An addendum to the proposal is to dam the Bosporus. This would cause the Mediterranean sea level to drop faster, while preserving the level of the Black Sea. And it would eventually provide more electricity.
In both cases, there is also the large amount of shipping to deal with. But that would just mean a set of locks comparable to what we already have in the Suez and Panama canals.
It's also interesting to consider the effect of a major earthquake or terrorist bomb after the level of the Mediterranean has dropped 100 meters or so
I tend to use HTML.... It fits easily on a disk, it's easy to add graphics, you've got a full-screen mode on every browser, and when you're done, it can go on a website without making you look like an idiot ...
And, most important, the web pages can contain hyperlinks. Then those who want just the idiot level can look at the main pages, while those who want actual information can start clicking and get all the detailed pages that you have included to support your top-level pages.
And, of course, the presentation and any handouts should prominently display the URL, for the benefit of the non-idiots in the audience.
On the contrary, the files do contain "content" (i.e., characters), and that content is almost certainly copyrighted. It's just not the music. But pretty nearly any string of bytes can be copyrighted. AT&T even claims a copyright on a blank line ...
Well, if it contains the descriptive info from tracks, this could be a very useful addition to any ripper. The problem is that the CDDB doesn't seem to contain anything other than the title of a track. There's none of the usual info (tune composer, people playing, instruments, where they learned the tune, etc.) that ever shows up. This info is also missing from iTunes, which also shows you just the track title.
If there's an online DB giving the "liner notes" on the track, maybe we can get this info onto our disks next to the MP3 or ogg of the music.
I for one, welcome any source of info about the music that I'm "stealing" (i.e., putting into a form that I can play on my own equipment). It'd be real handy when I want to, say, make my own cover of a song or perform it at a paying gig, and I'd like to contact its owners for permission. When they hide this info from me, I either don't use the music, or I use it without the proper permissions and attributions because I can't find them.
In particular, this is another case where the law merely requires that Open Source be considered.
You know you're in a pretty sorry state when you need laws that force your government to even look at more than a single source of something.
Unfortunately, such laws are all too often needed. Otherwise the contracts usually go to whoever has done the best job of greasing palms. And, of course, such greasing is always easiest for the biggest player(s).
we should just leave them in charge for a while, and when we are communicating with drum signals again, we can see who was right and who was wrong.
;-)
Um, this has already been done.
By Americans.
You just haven't been paying attenion.
Well, maybe. But this time, the arrogant world leader who holds the rest of us in contempt is the American president. If history repeats, then the US is in for a big loss of empire.
The recent history of giving "friendly" corporations the big contract in Iraq (and enforcing it with troops) is a pretty good parallel to the British actions that brought on the Boston Tea Party.
So maybe that history is repeating itself, with the names changed.
So what deep, dark secrets does the NSF have to protect?
...
Aren't they one of the agencies that pretty much publicizes nearly everything they do? Yeah, I suppose some of their funding discussions are kept quiet until they make a decision. But then the results (and much of the reasoning) are put online for anyone to read.
Now if we could just make the rest of the government open and accountable
If there are different forks, it does not matter. A company will pick one that does what they require and they provides good support from an organization they trust.
In my experience, what often happens is: A company (i.e., a small group within the company) picks an app that does most of what they need, with the expectation of having the missing parts Real Soon Now.
With proprietary software, getting the missing parts means trying to persuade the vendor to implement them. This can take a long time, unless you have a LOT of money as a persuader.
With open-source software, all you need is a few programmers. They do their own fork, to get the features that the company needs. If you don't have a programming staff, you can contract it out. In any case, you end up with your own version of the software that does what you want.
If you sell it, the GPL will require that you share your extensions with the world. But, contrary to what the theorists seem to think, I've found that managers hardly ever have objections to this. All you have to do is mention the possibility that some user will spot a problem and fix it themselves.
So I submit the changes to the keepers of the open source -- and in most cases, they are rejected on the grounds that they are too specific to that one company's situation. Or only some of the changes are accepted. In either case, the company still has its own "fork" with added features that are specific to its needs.
This is all based on the idea that a company either has its own programming staff, or contracts out the job as needed. This is quite common, and getting to be more so as the entire world goes computerized and networked.
We could discuss whether such things are truly cases of "forking". They are usually more like small side branches. But it's the way things often work. And it works best with open source.
Closed-source: it's about money
...
Open-source: it's about ego
Often true, but not always. I'm personally involved with several for which the main motivation is:
Open-source: It's about functionality.
Thus, as a musician, I had always pretty much ignored the commercial music-editing packages, because each one only works on one kind of system. If I can't email a tune to some friends, because they don't have the same software on the same system, why would I bother?
Then, a few years back, the "abc" music notation came along. Plain text that you can read. Small files that you can email. Neat software that runs on nearly every machine to convert to PS and MIDI. One of the best programs (abc2ps) is open source and produces PS output that looks better than 99% of published music.
The people involved are very low-ego about it. They are musicians who happen to be programmers. And, not being publishers, they shared most of what they have done. A few have a very small ($20 or $30) "shareware" charge; most are free (as in both beer and speech).
However, there has been a lot of forking of abc2ps. The reason is that the first releases were somewhat basic, and really only handled fake-book type transcriptions. It was very good at that, but lacked a way to represent a lot of other kinds of printed music. Then the author announced that he was getting far too busy with his job (math prof), and wouldn't be making many more changes, so others were encouraged to take his code and extend it.
I and several others started adding our favorite missing features. There has been a bit of merging (and sharing of patches). But there has been less of this than you might think. The reason is that different kinds of music have very different notational needs. A feature that I find mandatory for the music that I play often gets a "Who the hell needs something that bizarre?" reaction from other musicians. But they really need something else that I never use.
So, like all the other forkers, I have a list of features, ordered by what I consider their priority. I've implemented most of the top N things on my list. At some point, playing music has a higher preference than hacking some features that I don't need. So those features stay on the to-do list.
Merging the various lines turns out to be somewhat difficult. Each of the forks has required some significant extensions to the parser and the data structures. Simple merges aren't possible; you have to go through the diffs carefully and figure out how to handle the overlaps. But we mostly consider playing music a higher priority, so the merges don't often happen.
Another use of open source: Like many long-term programmers, I have a directory full of useful tools, mostly somewhat small. I keep them online, and of course others sometimes grab them and use them. Sometimes I get nice letters saying how useful some tool has been. And occasionally I get a patch (or a complete copy) of someone's extended version. But not all that often.
This isn't at all objectionable. When I fetch a tool of my own to use on some new project, I often modify it for that project's needs. I usually don't merge the changes back, because they aren't general enough to look useful in the future. No big deal. My online tools are really more like prototypes, "Here's how you can do that" examples. They're more useful as basic, clean examples than as programs that do everything for everyone. Forking of such things is desirable; merging back the changes is only sometimes useful.
Now I think I'll go practice some tunes for some upcoming events
What's American about that? It sounds like the approach of powerful and entrenched people anywhere, anytime.
I might be a little cynical but could it just be the NHS trying to get a better deal from MS?
You are being cynical, but there's a lot of truth to it, at least when you are talking to administrative bean counters.
OTOH, behind the scenes there is a lot of talk about Microsoft's long history of spyware. Many countries are getting stricter about who is allowed to access medical data. Installing binary-only software is starting to pop up a lot of red flags in the operations area. How do you know that the software isn't sending all your patient data back to headquarters? Simple answer: You don't. And with Microsoft's history, the rational guess is that their software probably does contain hooks that lets Microsoft people get at all your data whenever they want.
Of course, it's not just Microsoft. This is true of any binary-only software from any vendor. We pick on Microsoft because they've been caught red-handed so often. But any knowledgeable operations people dealing with medical computers are going to be very suspicious of any closed-source software.
What I'd wonder is why they're only talking about linux. I'd think that several of the *BSDs would be every bit as good. And they can run most linux software, especially if you take the sensible approach of compiling everything yourself. So considering only linux seems a bit short-sighted.
the paper actually talks about them putting a searchable front-end to the results online but then says they decided not to,
/etc/passwd entry and asking them to tell me my password. So far, nobody has ever done so.
Well, that's a disappointment. In the past, when the monthly announcements that crypt has been broken appear, I've generally responded by sending them my
If these guys could tell me my password given the encrypted string from the 2nd field, then I'd be impressed. Until then, I'll just take it as another entry in the very long list of claims that crypt has been broken.
Yeah; Linus has a real sense of humor about it.
;-)?
But it would be interesting to ask him how many of those quotes from him have actually been original, and how many he got from other people.
Not that this should diminish our respect for his sense of humor, of course. As the leader of the Open Source gang, you'd expect him to use other people's jokes. But when asked, he should tell you where he found the ones that he didn't think up himself.
We should also consider whether some can be improved. Thus the "marriage" quip would work as a rejoinder to all those people who think that money is the only valid motivator. We need a version of it that doesn't refer to Darl McBride, and that covers the general case.
And perhaps we need an Open-Source Humor Project to collect such humor in an online archive, so that it can be improved by everyone.
Let's see, do I need to add a