True enough. And as the numbers go in business, the numbers you cite are evidence of a highly successful strategy.
I've worked with enough "traditional" (ie head stuck up ass protecting centuries-out-of-date feudalistic notions of employment relationships) executives to sink a trillion dollars of dot-com VC into shoe-horning all kinds of bad business practices into internet-based business projects. And I've worked with enough "innovative" (ie gutless brainless talky talky no worky worky never do nothing) marketing types to stop the sun from shining, if only they could hold enough meetings on the marketability of sunshine. And, yes, I've received plenty of spam and scams so transparent (eg I stole tons of Nigerian money but I need a someone to help me get it so I'm looking for co-conspirators via mass email) that anyone who gets taken by them, frankly, deserves it.
But it's the thousands of people making more money due to unforeseen efficiencies of the Internet who are the more interesting story, in the long run. Just because something is more efficient doesn't mean there's a good way to commodotize it into a $20 billion dollar business. Hell, before the web ALL commercial use of the internet was spam: dunno why everyone expects it to make a new megacorp (oh, yeah, because they saw how successful Microsoft was in extracting profits from a predatory software monopoly!) as if you can control that sort of thing. The architecture favors a million successfull businesses that could not otherwise survive. The societies, right now, favor supporting an increasingly sclerotic class system and corrupted laws in favor of those currently in power. In the USA, this is a particular slap to our heritage (elsehwhere, you've lived with that shit for centuries).
Apparently they already tried this. But they didn't change enough to fool xvid. That's illegal: they have to replace ALL the code to make it legal. The next step is legal action. That's how you enforce a GNU license.
I don't consider the hours I've spent screwing around with config files to be a waste. I consider it "getting to know my software". Once upon a time, people expected to put some time into that sort of thing before using ANY piece of software. Now people are too lazy, I guess.
But the reason I don't consider it a waste is that the software does what *I* want it to do, not what some marketroid wants it to do. And I know it will continue to do what I want, instead of having my preferences thrown out the door next time someone decides that maybe, after all, I really do want spyware, upgrade nagging, submission to mailing lists, silent upgrades to important system components, their web browser as the default, their messaging software installed with an audio driver upgrade, email programs that execute code against my will, etc, ad nauseam. In the end, I get back that time I've invested from systems that don't crash, and things that don't magically go wrong when I install some unrelated piece of software.
So while I'll probably have OS X machines around, I'm also going to have FreeBSD and Linux machines installed somewhere, too. And I'll keep R-ing The F-ing M.
You are indeed right. It's the "asshole from marketing has plenty of time to argue his case since he doesn't actually do anything" phenomenon.
Though I think in the particular case of digital cable boxes, the programming is really, really sloppy at times. On once system I've seen, the program guide comes up on the current show. On the system I have now, it comes up on channel 001, two hours in advance. This fact is in the manual, which means they are aware of it, but don't know how completely stupid it is to assume that the reason I am reading the program guide is to leisurely plan an evening of tube watching, instead of just to find out what's on in 10 minutes because program X is on next and I hate that show. Bah.
It's going to be a serious problem. I see no evidence that we, as a species, will be able to handle our own programming needs in the future.
yes, and it happened a decade ago and it was called miramax. if there's one thing major media companies are good at it's knowing how to buy out the competition.
Of course. They waited until public attention was off it a bit - which also gave them time to gauge the response - and then applied the next level of culturcidal tactics.
Why are they doing this? Because they can, not because it's right. Some people think that anything you can get away with, especially in pursuit of money, is righteous simply because virtue is a matter of being rich. Do not let these people into your homes under any circumstances.
This is a good idea and absolutely essential. But on top of multicast, you'd want a p2p way of multiplying the number of streams served. There are a couple ways this could be done:
Work with existing streaming technologies and build p2p reflectors. This will probably require an encapsulating protocol, however, and clients that can use it. OTOH, this will increase the number of peers.
Write a ground-up streaming system that can serve to regular clients in a format they can understand, e.g. ogg. OTOH, this makes free riders overly abundant.
There are a couple of things the software will have to address:
A lot of people have limited upstream bandwidth or aren't peers on the net (private IPs). This means that there will always be a stream-availability problem. Oh well.
For the same reason, low-bandwith streams are probably about it. Oh, well.
RIAA and other gangsters are already salivating at the thought of shutting it down from the start. This means having a more distributed p2p architecture a la gnutella.
Due to the numbers of people likely to be non-reflectors, i.e. leaves not branches, you would want a tiered system - kinda like ntp - where tier one providers provide streams only to those who reflect streams further. Since clients could be hacked to lie about their level, you would need access controls to stop leechers at the tier one level. But these would also be a pain to maintain, so there would have to be some automated way of checking to see if your downstream clients are in fact making streams available. To prevent trivial hacks, these checks would have to be performed by another peer of tier one.
There would most likely be *large* buffering going on. But a stream delayed by a minute or more from the original source would not be a big deal most of the time.
It's non-trivial to write something like this. It could also decide the war being waged against humanity by the information priesthood.
Sure, I'll give you the link right after you prove to me that lack of a business model is the problem the webcasters have. You know, let's see the numbers you've worked out.
I mean, they only pay rates proportionally dozens to hundreds of times higher than radio, and radio stations don't make much money, so it must be poor accounting that's driving hobbyists and people with virtually no costs off the net-waves, right? Get a fucking clue.
Not a windoze programmer, eh? Windows and messages are central to the programming model. The number of exploitable progams is going to be either a) only insecurely written programs or b) at least one program on every computer or c) this guy really doesn't quite get it and is hyping something that's not commonly exploitable. I don't understand the attack well enough (yet) to know if it's c) or not, but i do know that there's no pragmatic difference between a) and b).
Machines might be faster: so what? The user experience isn't faster, the average user is dealing with tons of incredibly bloated software and a user experience that Sterling rightly compares to the prison-camp state of an airport.
If you really think he was cutting coders, I'd have to rate your reading comprehension as rather low. I love free software myself. I don't use anything else if I can help it, which is most of the time. So I feel pretty confident in saying you gotta have your head far up your ass to think he was cutting on coders or telling untruths when he said of free(dom) software: "It's very offensive to user sensibilities and it is as ugly as a sack full of penguin guts. But, you know, that is a vital systemic advantage." Or: "You keep feebly hoping that something will actually work right out of the box, and maybe even look nice. But then you get stuff like Gnome, KDE and Eazel... They just don't like to do the boring stuff for the stupid people! That's just not in the job description! It's not even a job. That's the secret." Right! Those are "flaws" in some sense, but those flaws are the only reason the damn thing works at all, and he sees how badly we need it: "But at least open source is clearly better than the Microsoft stranglehold. Man, US Steel, General Motors and Standard Oil at their worst and cruellest were better than that." Right!"
The responses to this article are so negative that I think we're in real trouble. First, geeks used to be able to talk in "code". Get it? Abstruse metaphors were like candy. Smart was good. Literate was worldly. Now it looks like towing the party line and shutting out, yes, "contrarian" views could doom this stuff to a band of easily isolated, mischaracterized "fringe elements." Second, we're in trouble if that's the case, because this shit is getting big and ugly pretty fast. Go ahead and whine about Dmitry, chat about "the cause", whatever. Keep fiddling while they strip-search you. This stuff could get really bad really soon, and as long as the geek set is anti this and not pro that, as long as the geek political mindset is "we don't have any friends and we don't think we need any", no one is in a position to stop the juggernaut.
Seriously, read the speech again with your brain present this time.
"Stupidest speach ever" gets modded to 5? OK, here's a contrarian viewpoint, then: you are too illiterate to offer a legitimate opinion of the speech. Not that I rest my case on your spelling; not that I need to when you offer up this gem:
Someone who would actually, you know, talk about real stuff like open source economics and how I'm going to make a living if the world ever does move to 100% open source software?
What, first you insult him, now you want him to give you a job?
The entire speech is about the economics and politics that arise from open source! First he said that traditionally, we've been working with bad metaphors. Cathedrals and bazaars make some kind of sense, but a real writer would never choose those metaphors because so many of the resonances of the symbols are just plain wrong. So he talks about closed-source software and users like it's a really bad girlfriend/boyfriend relationship - you know, where each person has something that the other one wants (hint: one of those things is wealth). Then he talks about the VALUE PROPOSITIONS that keep these bad relationships together. Go back and read those value propositions again if you seriously want to know the answer to your question. Remember that everyone has flaws, so which flaws are you willing to live with?
See if you can use your little noodle and work it out from there what he was talking about. Yes, the metaphors are free-form. That shouldn't be surprising, given that this is roughly the outline of the speech:
"I don't code, but here's a couple things to let you know that I understand how the world looks to people who do... It's not easy to communicate, and that's why people are using some crazy metaphors. The one that is best well known doesn't even work very well, and here is why... Now let's try some new metaphors and see if we can use them to get at what's really going on here..."
Man, there's not much hope left if y'all don't want to think.
Well, it's a bit of "street justice", that's for sure. These people make their living by breaking the inability of "The System" to protect people from rulebreakers, so this sorry hag gets about as much sympathy as a bully who's just been pantsed.
Wow. There is a god. I think I'm going to send that pic to all my friends with the message "Here's the douchebag who's been sending porno spam to all your kids. If you see her on the street, be sure to point and laugh."
This
picture of a spammer in action was pretty kuehl too. note the URL in action there; i wonder if that was how the dude hacked'em. I assume it's some "unicode-bypass-of-IE-security-just-in-case-Micros oft-can-someday-use-the-egregious-security-hole-to -skrew-a-competitor-exploit" type of thing. Note also the non-dotted ip format. I've seen that in action by spammers before, but I've never bothered to figure out how the ip is packed into an integer (never mind why browsers bother to interpret it). Anyone... Beuler?
NO NO NO, he's right, it is us. To save our planet, we must all move to the poles to keep the earth from tipping over. Start running for the nearest pole!
You know, some of us do host stuff - legal distribution of music by the artists themselves. I do. I spend a fair amount of my own money to do so, too. I support independent artists by buying their music and not the music of major labels.
Guess what? I'm still *not* not playing into their hands. They will restrict and are restricting our fundamental freedoms by chaining an industrial-era economic model to our future. Frankly they don't give a fuck if you are playing into their hands or not. Their bought-and-paid-for congressional operatives will get their laws through one way or the other, it's only a question of how hard they have to bullshit to ram through their insults to the human race.
Frankly, I'd be happy if they got no resistance for a while so the general public can see what their true goals are: the death of culture in favor of an economic model of consumption based on 14th century eunuch tenors. I'm sure you can sign up now to get your balls chopped off if you really try.
No, it has something to do with their having predicted the end of the world. Which is funny, because they accurately predicted solar eclipses millions of years in the future. In any event, we'd know a lot more about what the Mayans thought, except that pretty much everything they wrote was destroyed by religious zealots from Spain.
obSig: talk about uncritical thinking. you are an idiot!
Insightful my ass. Berman's bill is what *really* endorses mob rule. Just not the kind of mob you are thinking of.
Let them go to Congress. Please, let them go to the press, too, so they can complain Berman's bill was only supposed to give record companies, not hackers, the right to vigilante justice.
which is pretty funny considering the "harvard is not surprised" cracks above. and considering how many Simpsons writers went to Harvard (ever wondered why Burns is a Yalie?)
one of my favorite simpsons quotes
one of the most pathetic attempts at security of information online ever. in many states, you could find out someone's admission status simply by looking at their driver's license (the number in some states is their SSN by default). pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked with enough "traditional" (ie head stuck up ass protecting centuries-out-of-date feudalistic notions of employment relationships) executives to sink a trillion dollars of dot-com VC into shoe-horning all kinds of bad business practices into internet-based business projects. And I've worked with enough "innovative" (ie gutless brainless talky talky no worky worky never do nothing) marketing types to stop the sun from shining, if only they could hold enough meetings on the marketability of sunshine. And, yes, I've received plenty of spam and scams so transparent (eg I stole tons of Nigerian money but I need a someone to help me get it so I'm looking for co-conspirators via mass email) that anyone who gets taken by them, frankly, deserves it.
But it's the thousands of people making more money due to unforeseen efficiencies of the Internet who are the more interesting story, in the long run. Just because something is more efficient doesn't mean there's a good way to commodotize it into a $20 billion dollar business. Hell, before the web ALL commercial use of the internet was spam: dunno why everyone expects it to make a new megacorp (oh, yeah, because they saw how successful Microsoft was in extracting profits from a predatory software monopoly!) as if you can control that sort of thing. The architecture favors a million successfull businesses that could not otherwise survive. The societies, right now, favor supporting an increasingly sclerotic class system and corrupted laws in favor of those currently in power. In the USA, this is a particular slap to our heritage (elsehwhere, you've lived with that shit for centuries).
No, it was commenting on an ongoing case that got his rulings partially overturned.
+1, informative. Now let me be not the first to say HA HAHAH AHAHA A AHAH AA AH AH AH AH AH AH HA HA HA you fucking BT idiots. Fuck you. -1, necessary
Apparently they already tried this. But they didn't change enough to fool xvid. That's illegal: they have to replace ALL the code to make it legal. The next step is legal action. That's how you enforce a GNU license.
But the reason I don't consider it a waste is that the software does what *I* want it to do, not what some marketroid wants it to do. And I know it will continue to do what I want, instead of having my preferences thrown out the door next time someone decides that maybe, after all, I really do want spyware, upgrade nagging, submission to mailing lists, silent upgrades to important system components, their web browser as the default, their messaging software installed with an audio driver upgrade, email programs that execute code against my will, etc, ad nauseam. In the end, I get back that time I've invested from systems that don't crash, and things that don't magically go wrong when I install some unrelated piece of software.
So while I'll probably have OS X machines around, I'm also going to have FreeBSD and Linux machines installed somewhere, too. And I'll keep R-ing The F-ing M.
Now that's esc-meta-alt-ctrl-funny!
Though I think in the particular case of digital cable boxes, the programming is really, really sloppy at times. On once system I've seen, the program guide comes up on the current show. On the system I have now, it comes up on channel 001, two hours in advance. This fact is in the manual, which means they are aware of it, but don't know how completely stupid it is to assume that the reason I am reading the program guide is to leisurely plan an evening of tube watching, instead of just to find out what's on in 10 minutes because program X is on next and I hate that show. Bah.
It's going to be a serious problem. I see no evidence that we, as a species, will be able to handle our own programming needs in the future.
And spell checkers are dangerous!
yes, and it happened a decade ago and it was called miramax. if there's one thing major media companies are good at it's knowing how to buy out the competition.
HAHAHAHAHA that's funny.
Why are they doing this? Because they can, not because it's right. Some people think that anything you can get away with, especially in pursuit of money, is righteous simply because virtue is a matter of being rich. Do not let these people into your homes under any circumstances.
- Work with existing streaming technologies and build p2p reflectors. This will probably require an encapsulating protocol, however, and clients that can use it. OTOH, this will increase the number of peers.
- Write a ground-up streaming system that can serve to regular clients in a format they can understand, e.g. ogg. OTOH, this makes free riders overly abundant.
There are a couple of things the software will have to address:- A lot of people have limited upstream bandwidth or aren't peers on the net (private IPs). This means that there will always be a stream-availability problem. Oh well.
- For the same reason, low-bandwith streams are probably about it. Oh, well.
- RIAA and other gangsters are already salivating at the thought of shutting it down from the start. This means having a more distributed p2p architecture a la gnutella.
- Due to the numbers of people likely to be non-reflectors, i.e. leaves not branches, you would want a tiered system - kinda like ntp - where tier one providers provide streams only to those who reflect streams further. Since clients could be hacked to lie about their level, you would need access controls to stop leechers at the tier one level. But these would also be a pain to maintain, so there would have to be some automated way of checking to see if your downstream clients are in fact making streams available. To prevent trivial hacks, these checks would have to be performed by another peer of tier one.
- There would most likely be *large* buffering going on. But a stream delayed by a minute or more from the original source would not be a big deal most of the time.
It's non-trivial to write something like this. It could also decide the war being waged against humanity by the information priesthood.I mean, they only pay rates proportionally dozens to hundreds of times higher than radio, and radio stations don't make much money, so it must be poor accounting that's driving hobbyists and people with virtually no costs off the net-waves, right? Get a fucking clue.
Not a windoze programmer, eh? Windows and messages are central to the programming model. The number of exploitable progams is going to be either a) only insecurely written programs or b) at least one program on every computer or c) this guy really doesn't quite get it and is hyping something that's not commonly exploitable. I don't understand the attack well enough (yet) to know if it's c) or not, but i do know that there's no pragmatic difference between a) and b).
If you really think he was cutting coders, I'd have to rate your reading comprehension as rather low. I love free software myself. I don't use anything else if I can help it, which is most of the time. So I feel pretty confident in saying you gotta have your head far up your ass to think he was cutting on coders or telling untruths when he said of free(dom) software: "It's very offensive to user sensibilities and it is as ugly as a sack full of penguin guts. But, you know, that is a vital systemic advantage." Or: "You keep feebly hoping that something will actually work right out of the box, and maybe even look nice. But then you get stuff like Gnome, KDE and Eazel... They just don't like to do the boring stuff for the stupid people! That's just not in the job description! It's not even a job. That's the secret." Right! Those are "flaws" in some sense, but those flaws are the only reason the damn thing works at all, and he sees how badly we need it: "But at least open source is clearly better than the Microsoft stranglehold. Man, US Steel, General Motors and Standard Oil at their worst and cruellest were better than that." Right!"
The responses to this article are so negative that I think we're in real trouble. First, geeks used to be able to talk in "code". Get it? Abstruse metaphors were like candy. Smart was good. Literate was worldly. Now it looks like towing the party line and shutting out, yes, "contrarian" views could doom this stuff to a band of easily isolated, mischaracterized "fringe elements." Second, we're in trouble if that's the case, because this shit is getting big and ugly pretty fast. Go ahead and whine about Dmitry, chat about "the cause", whatever. Keep fiddling while they strip-search you. This stuff could get really bad really soon, and as long as the geek set is anti this and not pro that, as long as the geek political mindset is "we don't have any friends and we don't think we need any", no one is in a position to stop the juggernaut.
Seriously, read the speech again with your brain present this time.
The entire speech is about the economics and politics that arise from open source! First he said that traditionally, we've been working with bad metaphors. Cathedrals and bazaars make some kind of sense, but a real writer would never choose those metaphors because so many of the resonances of the symbols are just plain wrong. So he talks about closed-source software and users like it's a really bad girlfriend/boyfriend relationship - you know, where each person has something that the other one wants (hint: one of those things is wealth). Then he talks about the VALUE PROPOSITIONS that keep these bad relationships together. Go back and read those value propositions again if you seriously want to know the answer to your question. Remember that everyone has flaws, so which flaws are you willing to live with?
See if you can use your little noodle and work it out from there what he was talking about. Yes, the metaphors are free-form. That shouldn't be surprising, given that this is roughly the outline of the speech:
Man, there's not much hope left if y'all don't want to think.Well, it's a bit of "street justice", that's for sure. These people make their living by breaking the inability of "The System" to protect people from rulebreakers, so this sorry hag gets about as much sympathy as a bully who's just been pantsed.
This picture of a spammer in action was pretty kuehl too. note the URL in action there; i wonder if that was how the dude hacked'em. I assume it's some "unicode-bypass-of-IE-security-just-in-case-Micros oft-can-someday-use-the-egregious-security-hole-to -skrew-a-competitor-exploit" type of thing. Note also the non-dotted ip format. I've seen that in action by spammers before, but I've never bothered to figure out how the ip is packed into an integer (never mind why browsers bother to interpret it). Anyone... Beuler?
(like your sig too)
NO NO NO, he's right, it is us. To save our planet, we must all move to the poles to keep the earth from tipping over. Start running for the nearest pole!
I'd love to have that article. About 100 copies, tightly rolled, to beat people over the head with.
Guess what? I'm still *not* not playing into their hands. They will restrict and are restricting our fundamental freedoms by chaining an industrial-era economic model to our future. Frankly they don't give a fuck if you are playing into their hands or not. Their bought-and-paid-for congressional operatives will get their laws through one way or the other, it's only a question of how hard they have to bullshit to ram through their insults to the human race.
Frankly, I'd be happy if they got no resistance for a while so the general public can see what their true goals are: the death of culture in favor of an economic model of consumption based on 14th century eunuch tenors. I'm sure you can sign up now to get your balls chopped off if you really try.
I don't know, martyn27015@yahoo.com, I can't imagine why you get so much spam.
obSig: talk about uncritical thinking. you are an idiot!
Let them go to Congress. Please, let them go to the press, too, so they can complain Berman's bill was only supposed to give record companies, not hackers, the right to vigilante justice.
one of my favorite simpsons quotes
one of the most pathetic attempts at security of information online ever. in many states, you could find out someone's admission status simply by looking at their driver's license (the number in some states is their SSN by default). pathetic.