While I'm not particularly concerned about Caldera's well-being as a company these days, I get the feeling sometimes a lot of Linux users don't have a clue about Caldera's history.
This is not a fly-by-night operation that never did anything for Linux, guys. They were the first company that made a serious attempt to produce a "professional" Linux distribution. When their first release came out, Caldera Network Desktop 1.0, it attracted a lot of enthusiastic attention. And they contributed code back to Linux in the 1.x kernel days. (Not surprisingly, they made Linux play well with NetWare.) When it comes right down to it, the grand drive to make Linux a desktop OS for "non-geek" users started with Caldera.
If Caldera's no longer a particularly geeky company--and they certainly don't seem to be--that's a casualty arising from the combination of making their primary goal usability for enterprise-scale business users and being a public company. (Red Hat so far has placed using entirely non-proprietary solutions at a higher level than making enterprise customers happy, and has moved toward a business model that supports small-business and individual users.)
Even so, Caldera still has the potential to be an important company in the Unix/Linux and open source world, depending on what they do to integrate the UnixWare technology. A cynic would say their track record suggests they'll blow that potential, but that might not be the case. Look at what the article said about UnixWare-based POS systems that might switch to Linux--who would they be expecting to lead them in that switch?
This "Who cares about the CEOs" attitude is mystifying to me, and I'm a card-carrying, Nader-voting bleeding heart. If you are playing in a field with big businesses--and operating systems are definitely such a field--you'd better be able to play like a business.
Much of
Peanuts is actually textbook existentialism...
Much of Peanuts is Christian. It was rarely preachy in the way B.C. became, but Schulz was Christian and deliberately drew on his beliefs. I suppose it could be argued that Christianity and existentialism aren't entirely at odds, but think Ecclesiastes, not Sartre.
While you're correct in some respects, you need to learn more about the history of corporate law. The original poster is correct--the idea of what corporations entailed was, at the start of America, very limited. They could only be assembled for specific purposes, corporations had no "rights," could not own other corporations, and the charter could be revoked very easily.
If you learn your history, you'll see this was done precisely because of the power of royally-chartered corporations like the Hudson Bay Company you cited. These chartered companies had a great deal of political and legal power, to the point of acting as agents for the king. America's founders didn't want corporations to be able to have that scope and power initially.
As for "America's economic greatness," this is quite the red herring. Our economic greatness comes primarily from the vast resources we collectively have at our disposal; no other country has both the range of resources and the ease of access to and distribution of those resources. Our 'mixed capitalism' economic system is a primary factor in the latter (distribution and access), but that system doesn't intrinsically require nation-spanning multi-industry corporations; single-industry local and regional firms could do (and indeed, for most of our history, have done) just as well.
I don't think it's as much a "you owe me" attitude as an "it's my right, dammit" attitude.
I don't know if this is a peculiarly American disease, but I've been seeing it for a while now; it almost seems to be a peculiar backlash against "political correctness." Anytime anyone says anything that could be remotely construed as "PC," pseudo-libertarians crawl out of the woodwork screaming that it's their constitutional, God-given right to say what they want, where they want, to whoever they want, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.
I'm not a fan of PCisms, but I've come to believe that the problem of people being oversensitive--while real--is not as debilitating to our society as the problem of people taking pride in their insensitivity. Yeah, you're right--you do have a right to say whatever you want to whoever you want. But just because you can doesn't mean that you should.
Crazy idea--maybe What America Needs <tm>, from an individual level on up to an international policy level, is a better grasp of common courtesy.
NEVER EVER pretend that copyrights and patents are about freedom.. they are socialist in nature.
No, they are explicitly capitalist in nature. They are limited-scope monopolies on reproduction. Without the ability (according to the theory) for an artist to assign publishing rights to one and only one publishers, and to enjoin other publishers from also reproducing their work, the artist cannot be guaranteed compensation for that work. The entire point of copyrightz was, in fact, to empower artists in a manner which is a near antithesis of socialism:
socialismn.A political and economic theory or policy of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, capital, land, property, etc. (The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary)
The majority of socialists advocated a philosophy they saw as a way to increase freedom: if everyone owns X, no one has a right to restrict X. This is partially what most defenses of Napster boil down to; the insistence on a "right to share" isn't too far away from what early 20th century anarchists and libertarian socialists argued. (It is qualitatively different from Marxism, which instead advocated a duty to share.)
As a postscript: no, I can't think of any attempt to fully socialize an economy that didn't end in disaster, either. How this applies to copyrighted file sharing is left as an exercise for the reader.
At risk of being pedantic, this is what is known as a "hard choice." Despite all the noise about spotted owls and New Age women who live in old growth trees, by and large we've consistently been choosing to protect that GDP than protect the environment.
I don't disagree that we shouldn't take economic hardships lightly. I don't disagree that choosing to protect the environment won't have significant costs. In fact, I suspect if we put a serious effort into it, over the short term things could really suck.
What I do disagree with is the contention that "let's wait and see" is a viable alternative. One of history's clearest lessons is that as expensive as proactive approaches may be, they are consistently far cheaper than reactive approaches.
This is kind of like the "Year 2000 bug." Everyone in IT ran around frantically for two or three years fixing problems, and when the rollover finally came, the damage was virtually non-existent. And of course, everyone said, "Look, it wasn't any big deal after all." But if we hadn't proactively treated it like a big deal, it would have been. If we'd done nothing, and even a fraction of those systems that hadn't been fixed had failed, then what would the costs have been? Everything that was spent proactively, plus all the costs for cleanup. "Cleanup" would at the least involve billions, with a 'b,' in lawsuits, and might involve minor--or even major--disasters. (Some of the systems that were reported as having critical flaws were in hospitals, for instance, and in waste water treatment facilities.)
There were great strides made toward reducing auto emissions, appliance energy use, and cleaning up power plant and factory pollution made in the '70s--and gosh, things in the '90s weren't nearly as bad as people in the '70s said it was going to be. This doesn't mean the people in the '70s were right--but it hardly proves they were wrong. And if they were even partially right, we've saved a whole damn lot of money in energy costs and air and water cleanup.
As the comments in this thread indicate, a lot of people don't believe. It may seem clear to you and I, not to mention virtually every scientist not employed by oil companies, that there's evidence that human activity affects the environment; it may further seem self-evident to you and I that if the evidence suggests it affects the environment negatively that we have sufficient grounds to modify our behavior without waiting for "proof" of the extent of damage, rate of decline, and computation of short-term economic consequences.
But the greenwashing from companies that have vested interests in the status quo is pretty effective. "Hey," they say, "the earth has gone through climate change before without our contribution, so obviously that means we're not having an effect this time--it's just a natural cycle! So keep burning fossil fuels with impunity and ignore those idiotic regulation-loving liberals who talk about how much we'd conserve if we did horrible, freedom-oppressing things like raise fuel economy standards by 50%."
See, if you believe the "chicken littles," you'll be inconvenienced. If you don't, you won't be. And, hey, who wants to be inconvenienced just on the theory, the unproven possibility, that our great-grandchildren might face mass extinction? We should at least wait for a few more decades to see if things are obviously getting worse. Sure, that means that trying to fix things then will cause orders of magnitude more hardship than they would now, if it isn't too late--but until then, check out my new Chevy Subdivision SUV!
While I agree in principle, I don't think I can agree that "Illustrator" is generic when it comes to naming software simply because it's a word that existed in the language already--and it seems to me that's ultimately the case you're making.
I'd submit that Illustrator isn't a "generic" description. Generic description would be "Adobe Vector Drawing Program"--or even "Adobe Draw," which, indeed, has precedents similar to the ones you cite: Mac Draw, Corel Draw, Lisa Draw, Cricket Draw (for those of you with long, long memories). But "Adobe Illustrator" seems to be in the category of names like "Canvas" (Deneba), "Freehand" (Macromedia) and "Expression" (MetaCreations, now reverted back to Creature House). All of those words were, and are, relatively common English words, too--but they don't refer to a class of computer graphics programs. They refer to specific computer graphics programs, all of which have been in production for a decade or longer.
While I don't condone Adobe's handling of this (or the approach of allowing lawyers to handle it this way for them, if that's what happened), this is not a case of a company just laying claim to a common word and trying to sue anyone who uses it. This is a case of a company, or their agents, seeing another program in the same field as theirs using a name which is deliberately similar to the name that refers specifically and only to their product in that field.
Scott's "end-run around conservative comic book publishing houses" is being attempted because he isn't making any money from them. Read what he actually wrote. Pay attention to the phrase "utility cut-off notices."
McCloud's original source of ongoing income was Zot! it was never a huge seller, just a critical success, and it hasn't been a regular title for, what, nearly a decade now. Do you really think the royalties from Understanding Comics are so amazingly wonderful the man has no need to work, and is just advocating micropayments so he can get a few extra bucks?
The whole spat really comes down to the fact that Jerry decided to take the fact that Scott has an offline name for himself as an excuse to wage an ill-informed holy war. Jerry's condition relative to Scott has nothing to do with the validity of Scott's argument. Jerry didn't even seem to have read the argument very closely, as Scott's response pointed out. (Your comment suggests you didn't read Scott's response very closely, either.)
Corporations do not live and die by the consumer, they live and die by profit. I have some libertarian friends I love and respect, but the idea that corporations can do bad things that can only be addressed through regulation rather than market forces is just as alien to them as the idea that market forces can bring benefit to the working class is to a diehard Marxist.
This whole "all regulation is communist" bullshit is getting real old. It's the same tired New Right rhetoric that should have been buried a long time ago. Time and again corporations have proven that given a choice between (a) fixing flaws, even lethal ones, in their products they know about and (b) doing their best to cover up the flaw and continue business as usual, they will only choose (a) if it is cheaper than (b).
We'd all like to believe that companies succeed by delivering the best product at the best price, but companies succeed by being profitable--which simply means minimizing expenses and maximizing revenue. Pleasing the consumer is one way to do that. So is reducing your competition, setting up barriers of entry to new competitors, reducing your workforce, giving lower wages and fewer benefits, and making the absolutely cheapest product you can get away with and still be accepted. In a completely unregulated market, this creates a downward spiral--your competition will maximize profit by sinking to your level.
And anyone who has actually worked in media will tell you that the increasing media concentration is leading to fewer and fewer reporters working under more and more restrictions, turning in more and more tepid, "safe" stories--investigative journalism is a dying art.
Maybe you think a society where the only consumer protections amount to "stop buying Ford Pintos if you hear people are dying in them" is just great. I don't. If the vast majority of media outlets are controlled by three or four corporations who all get major advertising revenue from Ford--and will thus increase their profit by not reporting on exploding Pintos--that society isn't improved in my book, either. (Incidentally, the real Ford Pinto story was broken by Mother Jones, one of those crazy non-corporate left wing magazines.) And your assertion that the only alternative to unchecked corporate power is state ownership is bullshit of the highest order.
"The future is dynamic" is great on a bumper sticker, but you're effectively claiming that what we do in our present doesn't affect the future. Tonight's homework assignment: "The Dust Bowl." Extra credit points: why is the Southwestern United States chiefly desert? (Hint: buffalo and cattle graze differently, something European settlers didn't know in their present.)
From an engineering standpoint, this is simple: what happens if we listen to "the crazy greens" and they're wrong? A lot of industries lose money in the short term, while countries and corporations are forced to learn better farming and conservation practices. If we listen to the sane, rational corporations and they're wrong, the world gets a lot less livable.
Maybe convenience is worth both the risk and the lack of long-term progress in your eyes, but not in mine.
And last but not least, if I represent "the orthodoxy," I guess that explains why there are so many more Honda Insights on the road than SUVs, and why our new proposed national energy plan focuses so much on alternative energy sources and wildlife preservation.:-)
If you think the loss of rainforest land to cattlefarming is "fear-mongering" rather than reality, you have a much better imagination than any "eco-profiteer" I've read.
The bottom line is that concentration of power is potentially bad, whether it's corporate or governmental. I'd like to see as little concentration of power as possible. Given a choice between assigning power to an elected, representative government that can be held accountable by its citizens and assigning power to an unelected corporation with no accountability beyond its shareholders and no obligation to consider the interests of those its actions may effect, the government is clearly the lesser of two evils.
At least, that's clear to me--but I'm a crazy bleeding-heart liberal, I guess.
Re:CYAN DIDN'T DEVELOP THIS GAME - AMEND/DELETE TH
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Myst III: Exile Review
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The original poster was suggesting people send mail to Cyan expressing disappointment that they handed over control of their world to idjits. Before amending or deleting the post, try reading it.:)
Actually, a lot of pharmaceutical companies' "R&D" budgets goes toward maintenance research, not development of new drugs. A lot of the initial research they capitalize on is already done in a "socialist" manner: by tax-funded universities and federal agencies. In some cases companies help fund the research in exchange for the patent and commercialization rights; in others they're patenting and commercializing the implementation of the drug (so to speak). Nearly all of the most important vaccines of the 20th century came out of these "socialist" research facilities, not out of pharmaceutical companies.
It's also worth noting that drug companies are not exactly going out of business in Canada, where drug prices have arbitrary caps imposed by their socialized (gasp) insurance system. (Note that it isn't socialized medicine in the way most Americans picture it; doctors in Canada are still generally in private practice, and they're not hurting. They don't make as much as American counterparts, but they don't have the insanely high insurance rates their American counterparts do, either.)
You're very eloquent, but that doesn't mean you're not speaking nonsense. Like it or not, the learning curve is part of what makes us productive--or fails to make us so.
Could I use Emacs or vim as a word processor? Absolutely. But sit down two people who had a 'secretary-level' competence with computers, one in front of Emacs or vim--your choice--and the other in front of any good GUI word processor (or even most DOS word processora), and tell them to transcribe a standard, one-page business letter, block letter format, and print it. A standard 12-point Times Roman font.
This is a ten-to-fifteen minute process for most people in that situation with the GUI program, based on my experience watching customers at Kinko's a few years back. Now, how are you going to do that in Emacs? Remember, you have to set a font and print this. You need a print formatter! Let's teach the secretary LaTeX or groff. That'll go quickly.
You may think this is a silly example, but it's a real-world example. If we change things to a complex document, the GUI tools don't necessarily start falling behind, either. I'll do a full-page magazine ad layout--headline, line art, text that flows around that line art, that sort of thing--in Quark Xpress, a program I've used for about 10 minutes. You use whatever non-GUI tools you're an expert in. Mine will be finished and printed before yours. Guaranteed. There are things TeX does better than Quark, sure, but there are things Quark does better than TeX. This isn't GUI snobbery, it's reality.
I'm often a Unix nerd myself, but I've used enough GUIs to not have a knee-jerk reaction to them. Ease of use often does help people to be more productive. Don't knock it until you've tried it.
While I haven't seen any comments from Pink Floyd members about this, according to Alan Parsons, the recording engineer on Dark Side of the Moon, the "Wizard of Oz" thing is utter nonsense--they never talked about it during the recording.
(And, yes, that's Alan Parsons of the Alan Parsons Project.)
Perhaps nobody's been paying attention to sites like 'Coming Attractions', but the movie 'A.I.' is based on a story by Brian Aldiss; there's no way of knowing what they've done in the script, to be sure, but it's difficult to ask for a better pedigree. The trailer for the movie is certainly sentimental--but it's also enigmatic and uninformative (deliberately, one assumes).
I think people are jumping the gun a wee bit when they say, "Oh, the robot boy in the movie wants to be real so that means the movie will suck." When the movie comes out it may not be the story you (or I) would have told, but that doesn't mean it might not be a perfectly interesting story.
I speak with a certain amount of bias, I'll grant: I wrote an unfinished novel, a third of which saw print in a small press 'zine, a decade ago called In Our Image which dealt with very similar themes to the ones that 'A.I.' appears to be tackling. I used genetic engineering, and what David Brin fans would call uplifted animals. But the idea of a created, nonhuman race living among humans and with little more rights than other animals was there. The character in my story, Tara, didn't want to "become real"--but she wanted to be treated like a person. In context, I suspect those two desires are pretty similar. My story certainly had tear-jerking elements, but the storyline wasn't "Lifetime for Women," I don't think. And the hints of the storyline for 'A.I.' revealed in the websites are not fluffy and cheerful.
Scientology's one foothold is among the Hollywood Left, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, John Travolta, etc.
As someone on the left, I take a bit of exception to this. Point to Harry Thomason, Norman Lear, Danny Glover, Spike Lee, Oprah Winfrey, John Wells, Martin Sheen or others who are actually part of "the Hollywood Left" if you want. Hell, point to Jane Fonda if you must. But don't point to the Scientologists. I doubt you'll find a single one, in Hollywood or anywhere else, who is--in the immortal phrase of Bush the First--a card-carrying member of the ACLU.
You know, I have to take some exception to being called "sheep" because I buy CDs. Do you honestly, deep down, feel that because the current RIAA-supported distribution model doesn't compensate artists fairly, you are striking an idealistic blow for artists by using a model which, by and large, provides no compensation at all?
Reality check: if you download music copied from a CD sold by an RIAA-affiliated label, you are not "boycotting RIAA-sanctioned music". Boycotting means you are willing to go without a product on principle. That's not what you're doing. What you're doing is, at the least, legally considered stealing the music (presuming you don't own the CD already or buy it later)--and I'd have to say it's philosophically pretty dubious. If you didn't "just want the music," you wouldn't be getting it for free.
If you want to boycott the RIAA, you have to support artists who make their work available through "non-RIAA-sanctioned methods." But trading their music for free through Napster is not support.
It's easy to defend Napster for what it might become. I think digital music distribution is coming, soon, and I suspect it will live without the RIAA. But it will require a viable business model for the artists, not the record companies, that allows an average, "second-tier" artist to get equal or better compensation than they would from a record company and provides a reasonable level of promotional support for concerts, merchandising, radio airplay, and the like. Napster does not provide this model. A future model might be free as in speech, but currently Napster is unequivocally free as in beer, and we're not doing ourselves or anyone else any good by pretending otherwise.
If you look at ssh.com, you'll see "SSH (R) Secure Shell tm." "(R)" means, I wish I had any rights to reserve.
No, "R" means "registered." After a trademark has been in use for two or more years (with the "TM" mark), it can be registered with the patent and trademark office; until it's officially approved it's "trademark pending"--which indicates the process is underway.
Simply using another name isn't going to kill anyone. "FreSH is a free, open source implementation of the SSH2 protocol." Bam. (The hardest part for most people would be learning to type "fresh" after their fingers are trained to type "ssh"... although on second thought, you know everyone's going to just make a symbolic link to "fresh"--or whatever it's called--from "ssh" anyway.)
People in the open source movement are very good at standing on principle, or at least shouting on it, but there are times I think they should be a bit more willing to accept "be courteous" as a valid principle, too. "Technically we can do this, so screw you, corporate whore" may give you a warm fuzzy feeling, but it's an attitude which quashes useful communication.
Um, X doesn't have a UI. That's the responsibility of 'manager' applications that run on top of X.
This sounds like I'm nitpicking, but it's important to keep in mind. It's a double-edged sword. A lot of X fans defend the separation between low-level API (X), high-level API (a toolkit like QT or GTK) and window manager. But, it's that very separation that prevents the level of interoperability between windowed applications that you see in MacOS, BeOS, or even, in its own endearingly half-assed fashion, Windows. I don't have to worry about what toolkit a given BeOS application was built with; as a user, I shouldn't need to know that anyway.
I'd also like to submit the idea that this isn't just a "non-technical user" concern. It's an efficiency concern. The fact that someone is competent enough to work around inconsistencies in interfaces doesn't mean they wouldn't be able to work faster if those interfaces were consistent. As a "UI Geek," I'm not arguing that we need to take away the beloved CLI (even in BeOS, I'm using the bash shell a lot myself), but I am arguing that a full-featured, responsive GUI where menu behavior and drag-and-drop behaves more or less consistently across the desktop and all applications greatly enhances productivity and power.
Ease of learning doesn't necessarily mean ease of use, but consistency, responsiveness and quick feedback usually does factor into ease of use. The separation into separate processes, at least as it exists now, hinders these goals. Some of that can be overcome through brute force as CPU power increases--but it can only be truly achieved through a conscious effort to design a coherent system, not independent pieces.
Actually, if you read The Humane Interface, Raskin talks about a system using his zooming interface concept that was actually done for a hospital database. The ZUI is a strange way of doing things (at least for those of use used to conventional GUIs, let along CLIs) and I'm still not convinced it's definitionally the best approach--but his points are certainly worth thinking about.
The idea that the interface should be "data-centric" rather than "application-centric" strikes me as pretty sound. The browser-as-OS is often derided (including by me), but it's a tentative approach toward that metaphor. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, when you consider plug-ins: they're effectively transparent applications for handling new types of data. Right now they're just for displaying that data, but it's not too difficult to imagine an interface which allows "creator plugins" as well. If this was developed, you could arrive at a "smart appliance" which was actually useful--it'd be as easy to use as current IAs, but would be nearly as adaptable to new tasks as a current PC.
At the very least, I'd like to see the operating system "get out of the way" more than it does. One of the things that often torques me off about the current MacOS UI is that the "Finder" is presented, effectively, as another application which is always there. When I switch applications with Cmd-Tab I don't want to have all the windows go in the background while it makes the desktop active, and the GUI shouldn't need its own menu bar. (The "one menu bar to rule them all" schtick also torques me off--even though it can mathematically be proven to be a "better target" than a menu bar attached to the top of each application window, the visual reinforcement of what commands go with what window strikes me as an adequate tradeoff. For sick fun, watch an utterly computer-ignorant user floundering around with MacOS when the finder menu bar has taken over even though their AppleWorks document window is the only thing that appears to be on screen.)
Of course, the MacOS kernel torques me off much more than the MacOS UI, so I'm looking forward to MacOS X despite my feelings about Aqua being a step backward in usability engineering. Sigh.:)
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While I'm not particularly concerned about Caldera's well-being as a company these days, I get the feeling sometimes a lot of Linux users don't have a clue about Caldera's history.
This is not a fly-by-night operation that never did anything for Linux, guys. They were the first company that made a serious attempt to produce a "professional" Linux distribution. When their first release came out, Caldera Network Desktop 1.0, it attracted a lot of enthusiastic attention. And they contributed code back to Linux in the 1.x kernel days. (Not surprisingly, they made Linux play well with NetWare.) When it comes right down to it, the grand drive to make Linux a desktop OS for "non-geek" users started with Caldera.
If Caldera's no longer a particularly geeky company--and they certainly don't seem to be--that's a casualty arising from the combination of making their primary goal usability for enterprise-scale business users and being a public company. (Red Hat so far has placed using entirely non-proprietary solutions at a higher level than making enterprise customers happy, and has moved toward a business model that supports small-business and individual users.)
Even so, Caldera still has the potential to be an important company in the Unix/Linux and open source world, depending on what they do to integrate the UnixWare technology. A cynic would say their track record suggests they'll blow that potential, but that might not be the case. Look at what the article said about UnixWare-based POS systems that might switch to Linux--who would they be expecting to lead them in that switch?
This "Who cares about the CEOs" attitude is mystifying to me, and I'm a card-carrying, Nader-voting bleeding heart. If you are playing in a field with big businesses--and operating systems are definitely such a field--you'd better be able to play like a business.
Much of Peanuts is Christian. It was rarely preachy in the way B.C. became, but Schulz was Christian and deliberately drew on his beliefs. I suppose it could be argued that Christianity and existentialism aren't entirely at odds, but think Ecclesiastes, not Sartre.
While you're correct in some respects, you need to learn more about the history of corporate law. The original poster is correct--the idea of what corporations entailed was, at the start of America, very limited. They could only be assembled for specific purposes, corporations had no "rights," could not own other corporations, and the charter could be revoked very easily.
If you learn your history, you'll see this was done precisely because of the power of royally-chartered corporations like the Hudson Bay Company you cited. These chartered companies had a great deal of political and legal power, to the point of acting as agents for the king. America's founders didn't want corporations to be able to have that scope and power initially.
As for "America's economic greatness," this is quite the red herring. Our economic greatness comes primarily from the vast resources we collectively have at our disposal; no other country has both the range of resources and the ease of access to and distribution of those resources. Our 'mixed capitalism' economic system is a primary factor in the latter (distribution and access), but that system doesn't intrinsically require nation-spanning multi-industry corporations; single-industry local and regional firms could do (and indeed, for most of our history, have done) just as well.
I don't think it's as much a "you owe me" attitude as an "it's my right, dammit" attitude.
I don't know if this is a peculiarly American disease, but I've been seeing it for a while now; it almost seems to be a peculiar backlash against "political correctness." Anytime anyone says anything that could be remotely construed as "PC," pseudo-libertarians crawl out of the woodwork screaming that it's their constitutional, God-given right to say what they want, where they want, to whoever they want, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.
I'm not a fan of PCisms, but I've come to believe that the problem of people being oversensitive--while real--is not as debilitating to our society as the problem of people taking pride in their insensitivity. Yeah, you're right--you do have a right to say whatever you want to whoever you want. But just because you can doesn't mean that you should.
Crazy idea--maybe What America Needs <tm>, from an individual level on up to an international policy level, is a better grasp of common courtesy.
NEVER EVER pretend that copyrights and patents are about freedom.. they are socialist in nature.
No, they are explicitly capitalist in nature. They are limited-scope monopolies on reproduction. Without the ability (according to the theory) for an artist to assign publishing rights to one and only one publishers, and to enjoin other publishers from also reproducing their work, the artist cannot be guaranteed compensation for that work. The entire point of copyrightz was, in fact, to empower artists in a manner which is a near antithesis of socialism:
The majority of socialists advocated a philosophy they saw as a way to increase freedom: if everyone owns X, no one has a right to restrict X. This is partially what most defenses of Napster boil down to; the insistence on a "right to share" isn't too far away from what early 20th century anarchists and libertarian socialists argued. (It is qualitatively different from Marxism, which instead advocated a duty to share.)
As a postscript: no, I can't think of any attempt to fully socialize an economy that didn't end in disaster, either. How this applies to copyrighted file sharing is left as an exercise for the reader.
At risk of being pedantic, this is what is known as a "hard choice." Despite all the noise about spotted owls and New Age women who live in old growth trees, by and large we've consistently been choosing to protect that GDP than protect the environment.
I don't disagree that we shouldn't take economic hardships lightly. I don't disagree that choosing to protect the environment won't have significant costs. In fact, I suspect if we put a serious effort into it, over the short term things could really suck.
What I do disagree with is the contention that "let's wait and see" is a viable alternative. One of history's clearest lessons is that as expensive as proactive approaches may be, they are consistently far cheaper than reactive approaches.
This is kind of like the "Year 2000 bug." Everyone in IT ran around frantically for two or three years fixing problems, and when the rollover finally came, the damage was virtually non-existent. And of course, everyone said, "Look, it wasn't any big deal after all." But if we hadn't proactively treated it like a big deal, it would have been. If we'd done nothing, and even a fraction of those systems that hadn't been fixed had failed, then what would the costs have been? Everything that was spent proactively, plus all the costs for cleanup. "Cleanup" would at the least involve billions, with a 'b,' in lawsuits, and might involve minor--or even major--disasters. (Some of the systems that were reported as having critical flaws were in hospitals, for instance, and in waste water treatment facilities.)
There were great strides made toward reducing auto emissions, appliance energy use, and cleaning up power plant and factory pollution made in the '70s--and gosh, things in the '90s weren't nearly as bad as people in the '70s said it was going to be. This doesn't mean the people in the '70s were right--but it hardly proves they were wrong. And if they were even partially right, we've saved a whole damn lot of money in energy costs and air and water cleanup.
As the comments in this thread indicate, a lot of people don't believe. It may seem clear to you and I, not to mention virtually every scientist not employed by oil companies, that there's evidence that human activity affects the environment; it may further seem self-evident to you and I that if the evidence suggests it affects the environment negatively that we have sufficient grounds to modify our behavior without waiting for "proof" of the extent of damage, rate of decline, and computation of short-term economic consequences.
But the greenwashing from companies that have vested interests in the status quo is pretty effective. "Hey," they say, "the earth has gone through climate change before without our contribution, so obviously that means we're not having an effect this time--it's just a natural cycle! So keep burning fossil fuels with impunity and ignore those idiotic regulation-loving liberals who talk about how much we'd conserve if we did horrible, freedom-oppressing things like raise fuel economy standards by 50%."
See, if you believe the "chicken littles," you'll be inconvenienced. If you don't, you won't be. And, hey, who wants to be inconvenienced just on the theory, the unproven possibility, that our great-grandchildren might face mass extinction? We should at least wait for a few more decades to see if things are obviously getting worse. Sure, that means that trying to fix things then will cause orders of magnitude more hardship than they would now, if it isn't too late--but until then, check out my new Chevy Subdivision SUV!
While I agree in principle, I don't think I can agree that "Illustrator" is generic when it comes to naming software simply because it's a word that existed in the language already--and it seems to me that's ultimately the case you're making.
I'd submit that Illustrator isn't a "generic" description. Generic description would be "Adobe Vector Drawing Program"--or even "Adobe Draw," which, indeed, has precedents similar to the ones you cite: Mac Draw, Corel Draw, Lisa Draw, Cricket Draw (for those of you with long, long memories). But "Adobe Illustrator" seems to be in the category of names like "Canvas" (Deneba), "Freehand" (Macromedia) and "Expression" (MetaCreations, now reverted back to Creature House). All of those words were, and are, relatively common English words, too--but they don't refer to a class of computer graphics programs. They refer to specific computer graphics programs, all of which have been in production for a decade or longer.
While I don't condone Adobe's handling of this (or the approach of allowing lawyers to handle it this way for them, if that's what happened), this is not a case of a company just laying claim to a common word and trying to sue anyone who uses it. This is a case of a company, or their agents, seeing another program in the same field as theirs using a name which is deliberately similar to the name that refers specifically and only to their product in that field.
Scott's "end-run around conservative comic book publishing houses" is being attempted because he isn't making any money from them. Read what he actually wrote. Pay attention to the phrase "utility cut-off notices."
McCloud's original source of ongoing income was Zot! it was never a huge seller, just a critical success, and it hasn't been a regular title for, what, nearly a decade now. Do you really think the royalties from Understanding Comics are so amazingly wonderful the man has no need to work, and is just advocating micropayments so he can get a few extra bucks?
The whole spat really comes down to the fact that Jerry decided to take the fact that Scott has an offline name for himself as an excuse to wage an ill-informed holy war. Jerry's condition relative to Scott has nothing to do with the validity of Scott's argument. Jerry didn't even seem to have read the argument very closely, as Scott's response pointed out. (Your comment suggests you didn't read Scott's response very closely, either.)
Corporations do not live and die by the consumer, they live and die by profit. I have some libertarian friends I love and respect, but the idea that corporations can do bad things that can only be addressed through regulation rather than market forces is just as alien to them as the idea that market forces can bring benefit to the working class is to a diehard Marxist.
This whole "all regulation is communist" bullshit is getting real old. It's the same tired New Right rhetoric that should have been buried a long time ago. Time and again corporations have proven that given a choice between (a) fixing flaws, even lethal ones, in their products they know about and (b) doing their best to cover up the flaw and continue business as usual, they will only choose (a) if it is cheaper than (b).
We'd all like to believe that companies succeed by delivering the best product at the best price, but companies succeed by being profitable--which simply means minimizing expenses and maximizing revenue. Pleasing the consumer is one way to do that. So is reducing your competition, setting up barriers of entry to new competitors, reducing your workforce, giving lower wages and fewer benefits, and making the absolutely cheapest product you can get away with and still be accepted. In a completely unregulated market, this creates a downward spiral--your competition will maximize profit by sinking to your level.
And anyone who has actually worked in media will tell you that the increasing media concentration is leading to fewer and fewer reporters working under more and more restrictions, turning in more and more tepid, "safe" stories--investigative journalism is a dying art.
Maybe you think a society where the only consumer protections amount to "stop buying Ford Pintos if you hear people are dying in them" is just great. I don't. If the vast majority of media outlets are controlled by three or four corporations who all get major advertising revenue from Ford--and will thus increase their profit by not reporting on exploding Pintos--that society isn't improved in my book, either. (Incidentally, the real Ford Pinto story was broken by Mother Jones, one of those crazy non-corporate left wing magazines.) And your assertion that the only alternative to unchecked corporate power is state ownership is bullshit of the highest order.
"The future is dynamic" is great on a bumper sticker, but you're effectively claiming that what we do in our present doesn't affect the future. Tonight's homework assignment: "The Dust Bowl." Extra credit points: why is the Southwestern United States chiefly desert? (Hint: buffalo and cattle graze differently, something European settlers didn't know in their present.)
From an engineering standpoint, this is simple: what happens if we listen to "the crazy greens" and they're wrong? A lot of industries lose money in the short term, while countries and corporations are forced to learn better farming and conservation practices. If we listen to the sane, rational corporations and they're wrong, the world gets a lot less livable.
Maybe convenience is worth both the risk and the lack of long-term progress in your eyes, but not in mine.
And last but not least, if I represent "the orthodoxy," I guess that explains why there are so many more Honda Insights on the road than SUVs, and why our new proposed national energy plan focuses so much on alternative energy sources and wildlife preservation. :-)
If you think the loss of rainforest land to cattlefarming is "fear-mongering" rather than reality, you have a much better imagination than any "eco-profiteer" I've read.
The bottom line is that concentration of power is potentially bad, whether it's corporate or governmental. I'd like to see as little concentration of power as possible. Given a choice between assigning power to an elected, representative government that can be held accountable by its citizens and assigning power to an unelected corporation with no accountability beyond its shareholders and no obligation to consider the interests of those its actions may effect, the government is clearly the lesser of two evils.
At least, that's clear to me--but I'm a crazy bleeding-heart liberal, I guess.
The original poster was suggesting people send mail to Cyan expressing disappointment that they handed over control of their world to idjits. Before amending or deleting the post, try reading it. :)
Actually, a lot of pharmaceutical companies' "R&D" budgets goes toward maintenance research, not development of new drugs. A lot of the initial research they capitalize on is already done in a "socialist" manner: by tax-funded universities and federal agencies. In some cases companies help fund the research in exchange for the patent and commercialization rights; in others they're patenting and commercializing the implementation of the drug (so to speak). Nearly all of the most important vaccines of the 20th century came out of these "socialist" research facilities, not out of pharmaceutical companies.
It's also worth noting that drug companies are not exactly going out of business in Canada, where drug prices have arbitrary caps imposed by their socialized (gasp) insurance system. (Note that it isn't socialized medicine in the way most Americans picture it; doctors in Canada are still generally in private practice, and they're not hurting. They don't make as much as American counterparts, but they don't have the insanely high insurance rates their American counterparts do, either.)
You're very eloquent, but that doesn't mean you're not speaking nonsense. Like it or not, the learning curve is part of what makes us productive--or fails to make us so.
Could I use Emacs or vim as a word processor? Absolutely. But sit down two people who had a 'secretary-level' competence with computers, one in front of Emacs or vim--your choice--and the other in front of any good GUI word processor (or even most DOS word processora), and tell them to transcribe a standard, one-page business letter, block letter format, and print it. A standard 12-point Times Roman font.
This is a ten-to-fifteen minute process for most people in that situation with the GUI program, based on my experience watching customers at Kinko's a few years back. Now, how are you going to do that in Emacs? Remember, you have to set a font and print this. You need a print formatter! Let's teach the secretary LaTeX or groff. That'll go quickly.
You may think this is a silly example, but it's a real-world example. If we change things to a complex document, the GUI tools don't necessarily start falling behind, either. I'll do a full-page magazine ad layout--headline, line art, text that flows around that line art, that sort of thing--in Quark Xpress, a program I've used for about 10 minutes. You use whatever non-GUI tools you're an expert in. Mine will be finished and printed before yours. Guaranteed. There are things TeX does better than Quark, sure, but there are things Quark does better than TeX. This isn't GUI snobbery, it's reality.
I'm often a Unix nerd myself, but I've used enough GUIs to not have a knee-jerk reaction to them. Ease of use often does help people to be more productive. Don't knock it until you've tried it.
While I haven't seen any comments from Pink Floyd members about this, according to Alan Parsons, the recording engineer on Dark Side of the Moon, the "Wizard of Oz" thing is utter nonsense--they never talked about it during the recording.
(And, yes, that's Alan Parsons of the Alan Parsons Project.)
Perhaps nobody's been paying attention to sites like 'Coming Attractions', but the movie 'A.I.' is based on a story by Brian Aldiss; there's no way of knowing what they've done in the script, to be sure, but it's difficult to ask for a better pedigree. The trailer for the movie is certainly sentimental--but it's also enigmatic and uninformative (deliberately, one assumes).
I think people are jumping the gun a wee bit when they say, "Oh, the robot boy in the movie wants to be real so that means the movie will suck." When the movie comes out it may not be the story you (or I) would have told, but that doesn't mean it might not be a perfectly interesting story.
I speak with a certain amount of bias, I'll grant: I wrote an unfinished novel, a third of which saw print in a small press 'zine, a decade ago called In Our Image which dealt with very similar themes to the ones that 'A.I.' appears to be tackling. I used genetic engineering, and what David Brin fans would call uplifted animals. But the idea of a created, nonhuman race living among humans and with little more rights than other animals was there. The character in my story, Tara, didn't want to "become real"--but she wanted to be treated like a person. In context, I suspect those two desires are pretty similar. My story certainly had tear-jerking elements, but the storyline wasn't "Lifetime for Women," I don't think. And the hints of the storyline for 'A.I.' revealed in the websites are not fluffy and cheerful.
I'm stunned nobody else responded to this by pointing to the GNU-Darwin Project homepage. So here it is.
No, this isn't a joke.
you have to be black or the fantasy version of bill clinton on TV to be part of "The Hollywood Left"?
No, but I understand you get a 15% discount on your dues.
Scientology's one foothold is among the Hollywood Left, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, John Travolta, etc.
As someone on the left, I take a bit of exception to this. Point to Harry Thomason, Norman Lear, Danny Glover, Spike Lee, Oprah Winfrey, John Wells, Martin Sheen or others who are actually part of "the Hollywood Left" if you want. Hell, point to Jane Fonda if you must. But don't point to the Scientologists. I doubt you'll find a single one, in Hollywood or anywhere else, who is--in the immortal phrase of Bush the First--a card-carrying member of the ACLU.
You know, I have to take some exception to being called "sheep" because I buy CDs. Do you honestly, deep down, feel that because the current RIAA-supported distribution model doesn't compensate artists fairly, you are striking an idealistic blow for artists by using a model which, by and large, provides no compensation at all?
Reality check: if you download music copied from a CD sold by an RIAA-affiliated label, you are not "boycotting RIAA-sanctioned music". Boycotting means you are willing to go without a product on principle. That's not what you're doing. What you're doing is, at the least, legally considered stealing the music (presuming you don't own the CD already or buy it later)--and I'd have to say it's philosophically pretty dubious. If you didn't "just want the music," you wouldn't be getting it for free.
If you want to boycott the RIAA, you have to support artists who make their work available through "non-RIAA-sanctioned methods." But trading their music for free through Napster is not support.
It's easy to defend Napster for what it might become. I think digital music distribution is coming, soon, and I suspect it will live without the RIAA. But it will require a viable business model for the artists, not the record companies, that allows an average, "second-tier" artist to get equal or better compensation than they would from a record company and provides a reasonable level of promotional support for concerts, merchandising, radio airplay, and the like. Napster does not provide this model. A future model might be free as in speech, but currently Napster is unequivocally free as in beer, and we're not doing ourselves or anyone else any good by pretending otherwise.
No, "R" means "registered." After a trademark has been in use for two or more years (with the "TM" mark), it can be registered with the patent and trademark office; until it's officially approved it's "trademark pending"--which indicates the process is underway.
Simply using another name isn't going to kill anyone. "FreSH is a free, open source implementation of the SSH2 protocol." Bam. (The hardest part for most people would be learning to type "fresh" after their fingers are trained to type "ssh"... although on second thought, you know everyone's going to just make a symbolic link to "fresh"--or whatever it's called--from "ssh" anyway.)
People in the open source movement are very good at standing on principle, or at least shouting on it, but there are times I think they should be a bit more willing to accept "be courteous" as a valid principle, too. "Technically we can do this, so screw you, corporate whore" may give you a warm fuzzy feeling, but it's an attitude which quashes useful communication.
Um, X doesn't have a UI. That's the responsibility of 'manager' applications that run on top of X.
This sounds like I'm nitpicking, but it's important to keep in mind. It's a double-edged sword. A lot of X fans defend the separation between low-level API (X), high-level API (a toolkit like QT or GTK) and window manager. But, it's that very separation that prevents the level of interoperability between windowed applications that you see in MacOS, BeOS, or even, in its own endearingly half-assed fashion, Windows. I don't have to worry about what toolkit a given BeOS application was built with; as a user, I shouldn't need to know that anyway.
I'd also like to submit the idea that this isn't just a "non-technical user" concern. It's an efficiency concern. The fact that someone is competent enough to work around inconsistencies in interfaces doesn't mean they wouldn't be able to work faster if those interfaces were consistent. As a "UI Geek," I'm not arguing that we need to take away the beloved CLI (even in BeOS, I'm using the bash shell a lot myself), but I am arguing that a full-featured, responsive GUI where menu behavior and drag-and-drop behaves more or less consistently across the desktop and all applications greatly enhances productivity and power.
Ease of learning doesn't necessarily mean ease of use, but consistency, responsiveness and quick feedback usually does factor into ease of use. The separation into separate processes, at least as it exists now, hinders these goals. Some of that can be overcome through brute force as CPU power increases--but it can only be truly achieved through a conscious effort to design a coherent system, not independent pieces.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the original quote was "shit." It was the opening of Sturgeon's GOH speech at a WorldCon.
Actually, if you read The Humane Interface, Raskin talks about a system using his zooming interface concept that was actually done for a hospital database. The ZUI is a strange way of doing things (at least for those of use used to conventional GUIs, let along CLIs) and I'm still not convinced it's definitionally the best approach--but his points are certainly worth thinking about.
The idea that the interface should be "data-centric" rather than "application-centric" strikes me as pretty sound. The browser-as-OS is often derided (including by me), but it's a tentative approach toward that metaphor. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, when you consider plug-ins: they're effectively transparent applications for handling new types of data. Right now they're just for displaying that data, but it's not too difficult to imagine an interface which allows "creator plugins" as well. If this was developed, you could arrive at a "smart appliance" which was actually useful--it'd be as easy to use as current IAs, but would be nearly as adaptable to new tasks as a current PC.
At the very least, I'd like to see the operating system "get out of the way" more than it does. One of the things that often torques me off about the current MacOS UI is that the "Finder" is presented, effectively, as another application which is always there. When I switch applications with Cmd-Tab I don't want to have all the windows go in the background while it makes the desktop active, and the GUI shouldn't need its own menu bar. (The "one menu bar to rule them all" schtick also torques me off--even though it can mathematically be proven to be a "better target" than a menu bar attached to the top of each application window, the visual reinforcement of what commands go with what window strikes me as an adequate tradeoff. For sick fun, watch an utterly computer-ignorant user floundering around with MacOS when the finder menu bar has taken over even though their AppleWorks document window is the only thing that appears to be on screen.)
Of course, the MacOS kernel torques me off much more than the MacOS UI, so I'm looking forward to MacOS X despite my feelings about Aqua being a step backward in usability engineering. Sigh. :)