Exactly. The thing that fucks me off most about the coverage of this issue is the way dumb-arse journalists parrot the RIAA line about "artist compensation" when anyone prepared to spend more than five minutes doing research would know that the only thing the RIAA likes to give artists comes without lube.
JWZ's quote is snappy, but absurd, since it assumes that everything except Linux requires no time. The reality is that it takes time to get any system running correctly.
* How many dtp people use Linux? These people are not, in the main, technical types into kernel recompilation.
Actually, Framemaker is not, if you know the product, in the mainstream DTP market - it occupies a whole niche of document production; most of the Frame installations I've seen in places like Defence departments are UNIX based to begin with.
By and large, I think that article is the biggest pile of shite I have ever read. If it were posted to/. it would quickly get moderated as "Troll", its that funny
Quite. I rather think Nick has lost it with this one. Mostly because I can't actually imagine MicroSoft taking that kind of risk with parts of the crown jewels - a loss in a court battle vis-a-vis the GPL would result in huge chunks of Windows being forcibly released, something which Microsoft fought tooth and nail against during the antitrust trial.
Actually, the comparison with early Linux misses some important history: at the time Linux was released, the free (as opposed to Free) BSD source was tied up in legal wrangles, and people were annoyed with the deficiencies of Minix for a small Unix-like system. A Linux based system was actually one of the best choices at the time for people who wanted a personal Unix system.
All the ones who don't want to piss off their customers who use Palms, WinCE devices, and the like. All the ones whose customers browse from work. All the ones who actually give a damn about selling products and services for money instead of creating a Flshoriffic wank fest.
For now. Copyright-related bribery has already show the way: wealthy companies with a large copyright portfolio have gradually pushed copyrights from the point where they form a protection for the artist to the point where people born tomorrow will die with prewar copyrights unexpired.
And, in fact, the term of patents has already been extended more than once in my lifetime. Any company with a valuable patent (perhaps on a gene configuration your kids evolve naturally) will doubtless bribe whoever they need to for patents to extend another 5, 10, 20, whatever years.
The problem is that it isn't common sense knowledge. Especially not on/., which is infested with more than a fair share or ESR acolytes who believe property is an absolute right.
As for what to do; well, the FSF have one route, to pervert the intent of copyright schemes against themselves, which is pretty effective. The problem is that large companies are bribing governments (sorry, providing candidate donations) and using NGOs (like WIPO) to tighten things up again.
At the end of the day, the only way to solve the problem is to take political action. Much as there are plenty of political actions for land reform to elimate de facto and de jure fuedalism when land was the prize commodity, people who are being disenfrachised by the formation of multimational IP cartels need to start agitating for reform. That means letters to politicians, PACS, whatever works in your locale.
Of course, it requires a bit of effort, so don't count on most people here to join in until you've nearly succeeded, and there's credit to go around.
I think you'll find the point is that copyright laws are supposed to serve a social good. If we find that compyright laws are, as in the case jwz outlines, serving certain narrow interests rather than the creators, consumers, and society as a whole, there's no reason for society not to change them until they are good.
Then surely it's a better policy to create an attractive package that gets a few, highly skilled people involved than pay uncompetitive rates and end up with hordes of lass competant drones.
All valid points, but they can be overcome. These guys in my home town seem to manage by not having an office (thereby ensuring office politics are harder) and working over IRC for water cooler chat, meetings, etc.
My bet is that part of the deal will involve Napster Inc handing over details to BMG to let them go after individual users for copyright violations. Heck, perhaps they'll do it themselves.
If you want to complain about that, why not point to the microkernel based AmigaOS, which may still rate as the most popular microkernel OS, despite not having been sold in nearly a decade.
The market for BeOS is currently those who want an alternative to Windows on their home/desktop system, but can see that Linux isn't quite there yet. Small market, yes.
Yeah, it is small. BeOS revenues were US$68,000 last quarter. BeOS may be cool, but OS sales are becoming less and less fiscally viable.
Cold Fusion's greatest weakness is spawned directly from it's greatest strength: it's a damn easy language to learn and use. If you're good, you can do some slick stuff really, really quickly; if you're not so good, you can spawn a codebase that is impossible to maintain. Blame the meat, not the product.
I'd go further than that: if one of perl's guiding lights is, "Make the easy things easy and the hard things possible", Cold Fusion is more like "Make the easy things easy and the hard things fucking near unachievable". That said, CF is very quick to develop in and can allow non-programmers to do trivial stuff like build tables from queries very easily. But pushing its envelope hurts a lot.
The company I work for has some CF people, and they can crank straightforward DB backed sites out at a terrifying rate.
I didn't interpret that as an attack on someone else's rights; rather pointing out that while the senator wants to regulate something that has, at best, a tenuous association with violence, in the form of depiction, the senator opposes any attempt to regulate a tool which is favoured as an actual method of delivering violence.
Since both gun ownership and free speech are protected by the US Constitution[1], it seems intellectually incoherant to attack depict tools of violence while defending the tools thereof.
Most of the issue you cite are based on observed behaviour of a (potential) client. My no-claims bonus comes from the fact that I've driven on the road for more than 11 years without making a claim. I chose to live in a low crime area.
One observation I have on insurance: where it's mandatory, the comapnies gouge. Car insurance is ten times the cost (for me) in the UK that it is in New Zealand, and the main difference is that I'm required by law to have it in the UK and I'm not in New Zealand.
The only thing I find cheery in this is that it won't be a win for the healthy or the insurance industry.
The industry is moving to making money, not by insuring (that is, by averaging rick over many people), but rather by fleecing people who will never need insurance. So either the industry will be forced to make its profits gouging ever smaller pools of low-risk customers (as they redefine rick to be a narrower and narrower pool), or those people will wise up and realise that they don't need insurance, and the industry will go bust.
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Exactly. The thing that fucks me off most about the coverage of this issue is the way dumb-arse journalists parrot the RIAA line about "artist compensation" when anyone prepared to spend more than five minutes doing research would know that the only thing the RIAA likes to give artists comes without lube.
JWZ's quote is snappy, but absurd, since it assumes that everything except Linux requires no time. The reality is that it takes time to get any system running correctly.
That was kind of my point - claiming that since Linux is not used by the Quark crowd, there's no value in Frame/Linux, misses the point.
Actually, Framemaker is not, if you know the product, in the mainstream DTP market - it occupies a whole niche of document production; most of the Frame installations I've seen in places like Defence departments are UNIX based to begin with.
Quite. I rather think Nick has lost it with this one. Mostly because I can't actually imagine MicroSoft taking that kind of risk with parts of the crown jewels - a loss in a court battle vis-a-vis the GPL would result in huge chunks of Windows being forcibly released, something which Microsoft fought tooth and nail against during the antitrust trial.
If you didn't mind the risk of being sued. But it certainly was cite as a reason by many people at the time to hang off the BSD code base.
It was certainly enough to concern BSD luminaries like Peter da Silva in the early ninties.
Actually, the comparison with early Linux misses some important history: at the time Linux was released, the free (as opposed to Free) BSD source was tied up in legal wrangles, and people were annoyed with the deficiencies of Minix for a small Unix-like system. A Linux based system was actually one of the best choices at the time for people who wanted a personal Unix system.
All the ones who don't want to piss off their customers who use Palms, WinCE devices, and the like. All the ones whose customers browse from work. All the ones who actually give a damn about selling products and services for money instead of creating a Flshoriffic wank fest.
The English do make some nice cars. Just not in any great numbers. Consider the TVR.
For now. Copyright-related bribery has already show the way: wealthy companies with a large copyright portfolio have gradually pushed copyrights from the point where they form a protection for the artist to the point where people born tomorrow will die with prewar copyrights unexpired.
And, in fact, the term of patents has already been extended more than once in my lifetime. Any company with a valuable patent (perhaps on a gene configuration your kids evolve naturally) will doubtless bribe whoever they need to for patents to extend another 5, 10, 20, whatever years.
I think you'll find the Americans won it first, actually.
I've yet to have to bring the database down to backup Postgres. What are you doing?
The problem is that it isn't common sense knowledge. Especially not on /., which is infested with more than a fair share or ESR acolytes who believe property is an absolute right.
As for what to do; well, the FSF have one route, to pervert the intent of copyright schemes against themselves, which is pretty effective. The problem is that large companies are bribing governments (sorry, providing candidate donations) and using NGOs (like WIPO) to tighten things up again.
At the end of the day, the only way to solve the problem is to take political action. Much as there are plenty of political actions for land reform to elimate de facto and de jure fuedalism when land was the prize commodity, people who are being disenfrachised by the formation of multimational IP cartels need to start agitating for reform. That means letters to politicians, PACS, whatever works in your locale.
Of course, it requires a bit of effort, so don't count on most people here to join in until you've nearly succeeded, and there's credit to go around.
I think you'll find the point is that copyright laws are supposed to serve a social good. If we find that compyright laws are, as in the case jwz outlines, serving certain narrow interests rather than the creators, consumers, and society as a whole, there's no reason for society not to change them until they are good.
Then surely it's a better policy to create an attractive package that gets a few, highly skilled people involved than pay uncompetitive rates and end up with hordes of lass competant drones.
All valid points, but they can be overcome. These guys in my home town seem to manage by not having an office (thereby ensuring office politics are harder) and working over IRC for water cooler chat, meetings, etc.
My bet is that part of the deal will involve Napster Inc handing over details to BMG to let them go after individual users for copyright violations. Heck, perhaps they'll do it themselves.
If you want to complain about that, why not point to the microkernel based AmigaOS, which may still rate as the most popular microkernel OS, despite not having been sold in nearly a decade.
Yeah, it is small. BeOS revenues were US$68,000 last quarter. BeOS may be cool, but OS sales are becoming less and less fiscally viable.
I'd go further than that: if one of perl's guiding lights is, "Make the easy things easy and the hard things possible", Cold Fusion is more like "Make the easy things easy and the hard things fucking near unachievable". That said, CF is very quick to develop in and can allow non-programmers to do trivial stuff like build tables from queries very easily. But pushing its envelope hurts a lot.
The company I work for has some CF people, and they can crank straightforward DB backed sites out at a terrifying rate.
C and Pascal, surely.
And Dell's response? Blame Europe!
I didn't interpret that as an attack on someone else's rights; rather pointing out that while the senator wants to regulate something that has, at best, a tenuous association with violence, in the form of depiction, the senator opposes any attempt to regulate a tool which is favoured as an actual method of delivering violence.
Since both gun ownership and free speech are protected by the US Constitution[1], it seems intellectually incoherant to attack depict tools of violence while defending the tools thereof.
[1] I'll let others argue to what degrees.
Most of the issue you cite are based on observed behaviour of a (potential) client. My no-claims bonus comes from the fact that I've driven on the road for more than 11 years without making a claim. I chose to live in a low crime area.
One observation I have on insurance: where it's mandatory, the comapnies gouge. Car insurance is ten times the cost (for me) in the UK that it is in New Zealand, and the main difference is that I'm required by law to have it in the UK and I'm not in New Zealand.
The only thing I find cheery in this is that it won't be a win for the healthy or the insurance industry.
The industry is moving to making money, not by insuring (that is, by averaging rick over many people), but rather by fleecing people who will never need insurance. So either the industry will be forced to make its profits gouging ever smaller pools of low-risk customers (as they redefine rick to be a narrower and narrower pool), or those people will wise up and realise that they don't need insurance, and the industry will go bust.