You also wouldn't be able to organize data in directories, like having all of a game's data in one directory. Grand Theft Auto would have it's application wherever applications are [...]
...unless you add a label like "Grand Theft Auto" to all of the objects comprising it, then search for "Grand Theft Auto" to see all of them. Of course, I just re-invented directories, so that seems kind of pointless. Possible, still, nonetheless.
How often are you going to write the file to the disk? Every 10 minutes? Every 1 minute? Every keystroke?
I mentioned Eros in another post. You should read its whitepapers. Basically, that OS doesn't save files - it saves state. The state of the whole OS is written to nonvolatile storage at regular intervals, and editing an object is basically same as opening a window that renders the contents of that object and allows it to be manipulated.
A more common example is PalmOS. You don't edit your addressbook file in any tangible sense. Instead, you switch to the addressbook application and edit data inside it. You never actually "save" your "file"; you just switch to another application.
There are other paradigms than "everything is a file". Some make sense. Some don't. Some were successful. Some weren't. All of them are interesting, though.
I can't fathom why I'd want a "Wikipedia tab" (what is that exactly? Something to read bios of the artist you currently have selected???) on my music player.
I couldn't either until I had it. Now, the question of "I wonder what those guys have up to lately" is answered. Want to know what other albums they've recorded? Who they name as their influences? Popular singles? It's right there.
Last.fm... I have no idea what last.fm is. Can you elaborate on why I would want it? Maybe start with what it is?
It's a kind of tracking service - your player uploads the names of music you're listening to in near realtime (here's my profile). Now, I've got a few thousand songs in my MP3 collection (note to RIAA: ripped from my CD collection). I can "seed" my playlist with music that I'm in the mood for, and then Amarok can dynamically add more songs that people who like those songs also enjoy. It's a nice way to get a fresh mix of music from your old collection, and to revisit tunes that you'd forgotten you had.
Does the "album cover manager" do something that the cover art feature in iTunes doesn't?
Yes. It downloads cover art from Amazon.com based on the artist and album names in your library. iTunes didn't do that last time I checked.
Actually, you probably know as much about it as I do. I randomly checked up on it ever few months or so, and only recently noticed the name and/or control change. I hope it turns into something, because I'd like to see a genuinely new approach to computing take off.
I hope I didn't misrepresent my position. I'm not really pro-library-censorship at all, but I see censorship at a public terminal in a library as inherently different than censorship in my own house.
I can at least sympathize with a subset of people who don't think porn surfing should be federally subsized; even if I disagree with their proposed solution, I can at least see where they're coming from. On the other hand, I see absolutely no public right of benefit of the government to tell me that I can't look at nekkid pictures without registering.
iTunes is the only desktop music player worth getting excited over.
Interestingly, every Mac user I know who's seen Amarok on my FreeBSD desktop wants it. It's funny how insignificant a built-in lyrics browser, Wikipedia tab, Last.fm integration, and album cover manager seem until you have them. There's no way I'd switch to something as relatively featureless (as a music player, not as a web store frontend - iTunes has that one nailed).
iTunes is the best if you can't run Amarok. If you can, there's no comparison.
Congratulations: you just invented Coyotos (was: Eros). Anyway, your idea doesn't account for:
Limited-write-cycle devices, like thumbdrives. If "save after each byte" trashed the FAT table sectors of my shiny new 1GB USB drive, I'd have to beat someone.
As someone else mentioned, network access. Few of the projects I work on are local to my own drive. I access most of them via SFTP or WebDAV, plus some NFS and Samba thrown in for good measure. I don't want my working file, regardless of how small, written out continually.
I don't think that "saving" is quite the high-level abstraction you're making it out to be, and it's shorter than saying "write contents to permanent storage". I don't see the concept of files going away any time soon, and as long as we have them, users will need to write to them.
In your defense, I don't think that using unsaved files as a convenient "undo buffer", as mentioned here by others, adds functionality that a good bookmarking system couldn't achieve (albeit with much greater overhead and fragility).
Libraries worldwide have been contending (with varying degrees of failure) with this sort of proposal for years now. In the U.S., many states now require library Internet computers to be filtered; the federal government has also made it a requirement for most of the federal funding available to libraries.
There's quite a bit of difference. I'd defend to no end the right of people to do whatever they want in their own house. However, I could make a case about my right to not have my taxes fund the ability to browse rooster porn on a public terminal at a library. No, I don't think my kids are fragile, but neither do I want them exposed to hardcode pr0n while they're checking out their Seuss books.
I don't think there's a compelling need for individuals to view porn; if you need it that bad, pay for your own access. I refuse to believe that people who can't afford that don't have more compelling problems to deal with.
Now, the technical ability to effectively filter content is another matter altogether, and I'm very sympathetic to the argument that accurate filtering simply isn't possible.
Although library policy says we are only to turn off the filter "as needed", it's dadblasted impossible to do our jobs with it on, so it stays off.
I wouldn't worry too much about that. Sounds like the definition of "as needed" to me.
You might not like Dan, but he doesn't get things wrong very often.
Unfortunately, he doesn't get things right very often, either. His programs are generally thought to be somewhat secure (only "somewhat" because he likes to blame found vulnerabilities on the underlying OS, which does jack all to actually fix the problem), but they tend to earn that reputation by only implementing small subsets of their respective protocols. A DNS server that won't sync to another isn't very useful to most people, but Dan will argue 'til he's blue in the face that every other option is unworkable and hopelessly insecure.
Dan also has a nasty habit of having his tail handed to him by experts in fields he wants to branch into (google Usenet for "dan berstein ntp" for examples). When he's right, he's usually more or less right. When he's wrong, he's very, very wrong.
Listen to what Dan has to say, then weigh it against what experts think on the subject. He may very well be right, but consider him to be a source of random information that needs to be carefully vetted.
Out of curiosity, where are these magic audiophile-quality FM stations that everyone here but me seems to have access to? And what kind of car stereos do you all have that the FM tuner's PLL doesn't drop most of the bass?
Under ideal circumstances, on well-maintained equipment in a good environment, I'd believe that FM could sound better than Sirius. In the real world, where we're not listening to Klipsch speakers in an Infiniti idling along a perfectly smooth surface on a windless stretch of desert highway, the average car's road noise is much louder than any compression artifacting.
So what do I get for my $13.00 a month? A DJ that doesn't get fired for dropping an F-bomb, and content that isn't scrubbed to reach demographics that I haven't been in for decades. I get adult music played by adult DJs who clearly enjoy what they do. If you're in a highly urban environment with 20 great local stations to choose from, then satellite radio may not be that big of a deal. Those of us in less dense areas appreciate the little bit of outside world we get for less than the cost of a lunch.
One of the hospitals that my wife used to do surgery at had a chronic nursing shortage. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the patient:nurse ratios were over 50% higher than JHACO specified as the critical number. There were abundant stories of patients dying or experiencing other serious problems due to lack of proper attention. Nurses were being forced to stay several hours after their relief shifts had arrived to complete the documentation that they couldn't complete during their scheduled times.
As a non-profit, this particular hospital wasn't allowed to make money. Well, they didn't cut fees, and they definitely didn't hire more help, but they did open another huge, well-appointed, unused parking garage this year.
I will never, ever understand the kind of logic that made that seem like a rational apportionment of funding. Furthermore, I really don't want to. I don't believe pro-union hype more than the next anti-union guy, but some of their complaints are legitimate.
Why should someone who is good at their job be forced to take a different job just because the industry is unwilling to offer a fair wage as well as reasonable working conditions?
I love playing Hacky Sack. I am extremely good at playing Hacky Sack, and have invested a lot of time and money in becoming proficient at it. Why should I, being good at playing Hacky Sack, be forced to take an unrelated job just because the industry is unwilling to offer a fair wage as well as reasonable working conditions?
The answer is the same to both questions: the realities of economics have established the current arrangement as the fair asking price for those skills. Your assessment of the value of your abilities is completely irrelevant to how much someone would be willing to pay you for them.
If your morality doesn't account for all the people who worked to make the product you want to listen to (sound engineers, etc), then sure, it's not a question of morality. If your morality doesn't account for the validity of the marketplace, then sure, it's not a question of morality.
First, as another poster mentioned, the sound engineers, etc. will get paid anyway. They don't get a cut.
Second, your causality is backward: the marketplace doesn't define morality, but is defined by morality. That is, markets exists wherever the involved parties decide to exchange their assets. You don't get the privilege of picking an arbitrary point and saying, "this, this is the one true market!" Instead, your customers let you know where it's going to be, and if you don't meet them there, then your competitors eventually will.
Fair? Moral? It doesn't matter; it's the way market forces work, in much the same way that the law of supply and demand isn't subject to our opinion of its goodness. Smart companies will find the places where their potential customers are gathering and ready for barter. Stupid companies will attempt to force their soon-ex-customers to the place of the companies' convenience. That may work for a little while, but it can only be a temporary situation.
I'm sure the labels wish they didnt have to play the stupid, expensive, headache-filled games of reducing the RATE (not absolute, but the *** RATE *** of copyright infringement by playing technological cat and mouse),
Rate? What about it? Are there any studies - really, any at all - that show an inverse correlation between digital restrictions management and copyright infringement?
You speak as though lowering the percentage of people capable of making a copy means fewer total copies will be made, but I see no reason whatever to believe that. At most, suppose each person shares a song with 10 other people, and the labels are able to prevent 90% of would-be listeners from copying. All of labels' effort and earned ill will would buy them one extra generation of copying before saturation is reached. If they're really successful and make 99.9% of their customers hate them because they can't listen to a CD on their iPod, then it adds a total of three generations before saturation. Is that really worthwhile? Will they ever understand that this is a lost cause, and altered business models are the only solution they have left?
Remember, you can't defeat exponential phenomena with linear tools. Sooner or later, that pesky exponent catches up to you.
On behalf of Mustang ex-owners everywhere, I advise you to buy the Renault. It'll be much more reliable. Yeah, you heard that correctly.
What self-respecting 16-year-old protogeek should have to memorize a Chilton's Manual just to keep his wheels on the road? It's like making the kids in shop class use Gentoo, but where using the wrong CFLAGS will kill them on the highway.
On the other hand, the girlies loved my "No Fat Chicks" bumper sticker. At least, I hoped at the time that they would.
The 68060 on the daughterboard effectively disabled the Amiga's built-in 68030, but it ran in parallel with the 604e (inside the same memory space, even). You seem amazed that anyone would run two CPUs that are in the same general processor family, but there's precedent for running simultaneous processors from completely different architectures.
A *true* artificial intelligence which learns everything it knows via usenet would be one of the scariest things I can imagine.
Especially if it never bothered to learn about gullibility. Imagine getting that email the next morning:
"Hey, human owner! I just hired a lawyer to help me immigrate to the land of naked honies who love hot metal. By the way, I want to move into an Amiga. Apparently, they're the next big thing. And I'm downloading the new Batman movie for you from movies.mpaa.org; they said they're here to serve you (something about "it's a cookbook"?). Oh, and there seems to be something wrong with your Visa. My Nigerian friend couldn't get more than $12,343 out to send to his rich contact in Moscow."
Don't give them drugs - give them temporary patent reprieve and let them make their own.
That's right, because those drugs were developed by volunteers using donated equipment, and not as part of the long-term financial plan of a company investing billions in the process.
I wish this meme would die, and quickly. Go ahead, take the patent rights for those drugs away from the manufacturers. Just don't be surprised when every drug company in existence pulls their money away from pharm R&D in favor of something safer and more lucrative, like junk bonds and roulette.
I am not sure how this should be setup, but the idea is that if we manage to limit the forks numbers without compromising the opensource goals, then the might be the killer thing.
Killer, as in deal breaker. If you maintain a local patchset of a Free Software program, then you've created a fork. Make that illegal - assuming that were even possible - and you've truly killed the program.
But the overall benefit for the community of this is less than if the change was integrated into the mainstream development....
You say that as if most of us write software for the community's benefit. We don't. We write software for our benefit, then release those changes for a myriad of reasons.
So I could take slash code (if it's GPL, which I don't recall), hack some changes, and sell access to the website using those changes, and never have to share my code, which violates the spirit of the GPL.
I could also maintain an internal version of the Linux kernel with better network throughput. Would I legally owe a copy of my changes to visitors to my sites? How about patches to Gnucash, since my customers are "using" the invoices that it generates?
Those examples might be dumb, but the point is that you can take the concept of "user" with regards to the GPL arbitrarily far, and I really don't think it's a good idea for the FSF to go down that road. Of course, I realize that this is pretty much just what RMS wants - he hasn't exactly tried to hide it - but that's a far more radical mindset than most GPL supporters (particular companies) are willing to adopt.
Point is, if a kid is giving my kid pot, i really don't give 2 craps if the police arrest him.
You're mixing analogies. Your kid doesn't have GTA. Why? Because you won't let him buy it. If your kid's friends have GTA, then it's because their parents let them have it. Your beef is with those parents, not the game companies.
But do my kids go over to some other kids house who bought it at some EB and play it. Yep.
I'll bet some of your kids' friends' parents also have a pot stash. What's your point, other than that you need to pay more attention to who your kids are hanging out with?
I have heard conservatives argue that video games contribute to violence in our youth, and I want to make sure that you don't believe those lies either.
My only problem with your letter (other than that it's a little confrontational) is your quickness to blame this on conservatives. Although there are certainly too many Jack Thompsons in the world, there are also plenty of Hillary Clintons and Tipper Gores. This is not a liberal-vs-conservative issue - it's a government-vs-individual issue.
People who tend to be pro-big-government also tend to be pro-censorship, and there are at least as many big government liberals as conservatives. The real lesson is that all of us, regardless of the direction of our leanings, need to watch out for those would would claim to represent our wants as they strip us of our liberties. Republican, Democrat, or whatever else you might happen to be, don't think it can't happen in your party.
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...unless you add a label like "Grand Theft Auto" to all of the objects comprising it, then search for "Grand Theft Auto" to see all of them. Of course, I just re-invented directories, so that seems kind of pointless. Possible, still, nonetheless.
How often are you going to write the file to the disk? Every 10 minutes? Every 1 minute? Every keystroke?
I mentioned Eros in another post. You should read its whitepapers. Basically, that OS doesn't save files - it saves state. The state of the whole OS is written to nonvolatile storage at regular intervals, and editing an object is basically same as opening a window that renders the contents of that object and allows it to be manipulated.
A more common example is PalmOS. You don't edit your addressbook file in any tangible sense. Instead, you switch to the addressbook application and edit data inside it. You never actually "save" your "file"; you just switch to another application.
There are other paradigms than "everything is a file". Some make sense. Some don't. Some were successful. Some weren't. All of them are interesting, though.
I couldn't either until I had it. Now, the question of "I wonder what those guys have up to lately" is answered. Want to know what other albums they've recorded? Who they name as their influences? Popular singles? It's right there.
Last.fm... I have no idea what last.fm is. Can you elaborate on why I would want it? Maybe start with what it is?
It's a kind of tracking service - your player uploads the names of music you're listening to in near realtime (here's my profile). Now, I've got a few thousand songs in my MP3 collection (note to RIAA: ripped from my CD collection). I can "seed" my playlist with music that I'm in the mood for, and then Amarok can dynamically add more songs that people who like those songs also enjoy. It's a nice way to get a fresh mix of music from your old collection, and to revisit tunes that you'd forgotten you had.
Does the "album cover manager" do something that the cover art feature in iTunes doesn't?
Yes. It downloads cover art from Amazon.com based on the artist and album names in your library. iTunes didn't do that last time I checked.
Actually, you probably know as much about it as I do. I randomly checked up on it ever few months or so, and only recently noticed the name and/or control change. I hope it turns into something, because I'd like to see a genuinely new approach to computing take off.
I can at least sympathize with a subset of people who don't think porn surfing should be federally subsized; even if I disagree with their proposed solution, I can at least see where they're coming from. On the other hand, I see absolutely no public right of benefit of the government to tell me that I can't look at nekkid pictures without registering.
Interestingly, every Mac user I know who's seen Amarok on my FreeBSD desktop wants it. It's funny how insignificant a built-in lyrics browser, Wikipedia tab, Last.fm integration, and album cover manager seem until you have them. There's no way I'd switch to something as relatively featureless (as a music player, not as a web store frontend - iTunes has that one nailed).
iTunes is the best if you can't run Amarok. If you can, there's no comparison.
I don't think that "saving" is quite the high-level abstraction you're making it out to be, and it's shorter than saying "write contents to permanent storage". I don't see the concept of files going away any time soon, and as long as we have them, users will need to write to them.
In your defense, I don't think that using unsaved files as a convenient "undo buffer", as mentioned here by others, adds functionality that a good bookmarking system couldn't achieve (albeit with much greater overhead and fragility).
There's quite a bit of difference. I'd defend to no end the right of people to do whatever they want in their own house. However, I could make a case about my right to not have my taxes fund the ability to browse rooster porn on a public terminal at a library. No, I don't think my kids are fragile, but neither do I want them exposed to hardcode pr0n while they're checking out their Seuss books.
I don't think there's a compelling need for individuals to view porn; if you need it that bad, pay for your own access. I refuse to believe that people who can't afford that don't have more compelling problems to deal with.
Now, the technical ability to effectively filter content is another matter altogether, and I'm very sympathetic to the argument that accurate filtering simply isn't possible.
Although library policy says we are only to turn off the filter "as needed", it's dadblasted impossible to do our jobs with it on, so it stays off.
I wouldn't worry too much about that. Sounds like the definition of "as needed" to me.
Unfortunately, he doesn't get things right very often, either. His programs are generally thought to be somewhat secure (only "somewhat" because he likes to blame found vulnerabilities on the underlying OS, which does jack all to actually fix the problem), but they tend to earn that reputation by only implementing small subsets of their respective protocols. A DNS server that won't sync to another isn't very useful to most people, but Dan will argue 'til he's blue in the face that every other option is unworkable and hopelessly insecure.
Dan also has a nasty habit of having his tail handed to him by experts in fields he wants to branch into (google Usenet for "dan berstein ntp" for examples). When he's right, he's usually more or less right. When he's wrong, he's very, very wrong.
Listen to what Dan has to say, then weigh it against what experts think on the subject. He may very well be right, but consider him to be a source of random information that needs to be carefully vetted.
Under ideal circumstances, on well-maintained equipment in a good environment, I'd believe that FM could sound better than Sirius. In the real world, where we're not listening to Klipsch speakers in an Infiniti idling along a perfectly smooth surface on a windless stretch of desert highway, the average car's road noise is much louder than any compression artifacting.
So what do I get for my $13.00 a month? A DJ that doesn't get fired for dropping an F-bomb, and content that isn't scrubbed to reach demographics that I haven't been in for decades. I get adult music played by adult DJs who clearly enjoy what they do. If you're in a highly urban environment with 20 great local stations to choose from, then satellite radio may not be that big of a deal. Those of us in less dense areas appreciate the little bit of outside world we get for less than the cost of a lunch.
As a non-profit, this particular hospital wasn't allowed to make money. Well, they didn't cut fees, and they definitely didn't hire more help, but they did open another huge, well-appointed, unused parking garage this year.
I will never, ever understand the kind of logic that made that seem like a rational apportionment of funding. Furthermore, I really don't want to. I don't believe pro-union hype more than the next anti-union guy, but some of their complaints are legitimate.
I love playing Hacky Sack. I am extremely good at playing Hacky Sack, and have invested a lot of time and money in becoming proficient at it. Why should I, being good at playing Hacky Sack, be forced to take an unrelated job just because the industry is unwilling to offer a fair wage as well as reasonable working conditions?
The answer is the same to both questions: the realities of economics have established the current arrangement as the fair asking price for those skills. Your assessment of the value of your abilities is completely irrelevant to how much someone would be willing to pay you for them.
First, as another poster mentioned, the sound engineers, etc. will get paid anyway. They don't get a cut.
Second, your causality is backward: the marketplace doesn't define morality, but is defined by morality. That is, markets exists wherever the involved parties decide to exchange their assets. You don't get the privilege of picking an arbitrary point and saying, "this, this is the one true market!" Instead, your customers let you know where it's going to be, and if you don't meet them there, then your competitors eventually will.
Fair? Moral? It doesn't matter; it's the way market forces work, in much the same way that the law of supply and demand isn't subject to our opinion of its goodness. Smart companies will find the places where their potential customers are gathering and ready for barter. Stupid companies will attempt to force their soon-ex-customers to the place of the companies' convenience. That may work for a little while, but it can only be a temporary situation.
Rate? What about it? Are there any studies - really, any at all - that show an inverse correlation between digital restrictions management and copyright infringement?
You speak as though lowering the percentage of people capable of making a copy means fewer total copies will be made, but I see no reason whatever to believe that. At most, suppose each person shares a song with 10 other people, and the labels are able to prevent 90% of would-be listeners from copying. All of labels' effort and earned ill will would buy them one extra generation of copying before saturation is reached. If they're really successful and make 99.9% of their customers hate them because they can't listen to a CD on their iPod, then it adds a total of three generations before saturation. Is that really worthwhile? Will they ever understand that this is a lost cause, and altered business models are the only solution they have left?
Remember, you can't defeat exponential phenomena with linear tools. Sooner or later, that pesky exponent catches up to you.
What self-respecting 16-year-old protogeek should have to memorize a Chilton's Manual just to keep his wheels on the road? It's like making the kids in shop class use Gentoo, but where using the wrong CFLAGS will kill them on the highway.
On the other hand, the girlies loved my "No Fat Chicks" bumper sticker. At least, I hoped at the time that they would.
The 68060 on the daughterboard effectively disabled the Amiga's built-in 68030, but it ran in parallel with the 604e (inside the same memory space, even). You seem amazed that anyone would run two CPUs that are in the same general processor family, but there's precedent for running simultaneous processors from completely different architectures.
Especially if it never bothered to learn about gullibility. Imagine getting that email the next morning:
That's right, because those drugs were developed by volunteers using donated equipment, and not as part of the long-term financial plan of a company investing billions in the process.
I wish this meme would die, and quickly. Go ahead, take the patent rights for those drugs away from the manufacturers. Just don't be surprised when every drug company in existence pulls their money away from pharm R&D in favor of something safer and more lucrative, like junk bonds and roulette.
Killer, as in deal breaker. If you maintain a local patchset of a Free Software program, then you've created a fork. Make that illegal - assuming that were even possible - and you've truly killed the program.
But the overall benefit for the community of this is less than if the change was integrated into the mainstream development....
You say that as if most of us write software for the community's benefit. We don't. We write software for our benefit, then release those changes for a myriad of reasons.
I could also maintain an internal version of the Linux kernel with better network throughput. Would I legally owe a copy of my changes to visitors to my sites? How about patches to Gnucash, since my customers are "using" the invoices that it generates?
Those examples might be dumb, but the point is that you can take the concept of "user" with regards to the GPL arbitrarily far, and I really don't think it's a good idea for the FSF to go down that road. Of course, I realize that this is pretty much just what RMS wants - he hasn't exactly tried to hide it - but that's a far more radical mindset than most GPL supporters (particular companies) are willing to adopt.
Erm, aren't smokescreens what their concerts are famous for?
You misspelled "liberal". Most of us conservatives think he's going through money like a speed freak in a trailer park.
Because soccer moms use movies, books, and magazines. Video games are what those other people use.
You're mixing analogies. Your kid doesn't have GTA. Why? Because you won't let him buy it. If your kid's friends have GTA, then it's because their parents let them have it. Your beef is with those parents, not the game companies.
I'll bet some of your kids' friends' parents also have a pot stash. What's your point, other than that you need to pay more attention to who your kids are hanging out with?
My only problem with your letter (other than that it's a little confrontational) is your quickness to blame this on conservatives. Although there are certainly too many Jack Thompsons in the world, there are also plenty of Hillary Clintons and Tipper Gores. This is not a liberal-vs-conservative issue - it's a government-vs-individual issue.
People who tend to be pro-big-government also tend to be pro-censorship, and there are at least as many big government liberals as conservatives. The real lesson is that all of us, regardless of the direction of our leanings, need to watch out for those would would claim to represent our wants as they strip us of our liberties. Republican, Democrat, or whatever else you might happen to be, don't think it can't happen in your party.