If you all would stop whining, and put together a letter to the patent office detailing why this is obvious to us (since we ARE in the trade), you might be surprised that they pull the damn thing!
You obviously haven't been here long. You obviously are still under the false impression that the patent office give one-half of a rat's ass (yes, that would be one rat butt cheek) whether it's patents are actually non-obvious.
For reference, read up on:
Amazon's now-famous one-click patent.
Amazon's not as well known affiliate program patent
Some obscure company's (I don't remember who) patent on hyperlinking. Post-HTML, of course
There are several more I can't think of at the moment...
I hope it has the capability to, upon making changes, show you exactly what it did. What files were changed, what was added or removed, and a quick little explanation of each change.
What better way to learn the fundamentals of system configuration?
Is anyone else tired of Napster discussion being beaten to death? Nothing new comes from these new threads, every argument has been made, every position explored. All there is to be done now is to perhaps share different points of view with people who haven't heard it all ten THOUSAND times, and wait patiently.
Basically, as long as your spam has a valid From: address, "ADV" in the subject line, an opt-out mechanism, and doesn't forge header information or domain names, you can spam all you want. And that really doesn't do a whole hell of a lot of good IMHO.
Doesn't do a lot of good? Are you mad??
:0:
* ^Subject:.*ADV.*
/dev/null
...to never get spam in my inbox again. That would sure make ME a happy camper!
And what you want is technology that basically examines an open MP3 file that's being transferred to a portable device and decides whether or not it should be admitted to the portable device.
And so this portable device that I own, that I bought, that I'm holding in my hand, can still only be used in such a way that the people that I bought it from like.
What if gas stations sold gas that only worked if it was in a car? Oh, most people wouldn't have a problem, but what about the person who takes it out to a bonfire to start a fire? Why is the person I bought it from deciding how I should use it?
Unethical as it would be, it would be so tempting to play their game and fight stuff like this the dirty way. Write software that supposedly supports it, but is broken in some fundamental way. Circulate FUD. Circulate broken SDMI music files. Make it so damn difficult and impractical to use, that no one bothers to even try.
I apologize for my rudeness in my earlier post, I was annoyed at what seemed like a condescending lecture. I think I perceived it wrong.
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Surely you can see the circular reasoning going on here. It's going to continue to suck for as long as no one uses it! We have the advantage of dealing with such small amounts of money--The service charges at this point are worth it to me to make a statement against the music industry, and place a small bet on the off-chance that this fairtunes thing goes big and gets press.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Point taken. Personally, I trust them because I see them to be like me, young idealists who are disenchanted with the industry, and want to put enough time and resources into the project to make a company out of it. Naive? Perhaps, but like I said, there's so little money coming out of my pocket I'm willing to take a chance at the opportunity to make a statement.
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
Fairtunes is also brand new, and since its existence is based on this very idea, it can be tailored to make just this kind of transaction painless. They have plans in the works to write plugins for for the major media players that allow you to tip the artist when you play their song. Who else knows what they could come up with?
And any officially sanctioned scheme like you describe would legally have to involve the record company. So by participating in it I don't achieve my goal of excluding the record company.
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it.
And I certainly would be less likely to tip musicians who had openly declared war on me.
But think about this: how likely are people going to be to try this until they're shown it works? Stephen King can afford to, and isn't bound by a draconian exclusive contract that forbids him from writing books on his own. I see this as the chance to show them it CAN work, and leave them with less reason to try and litigate against me. Of course the leeches at the RIAA will still try, but how will anyone take their rhetoric about it being "for the artist" seriously if the artists don't support their actions?
...reading your essay now, but there'd be no way to finish it and the comment on it before this discussion thread was dead...
Don't worry, I read it. The fact still remains, however, that you've never seen the metal, and the principle still remains that everyone must draw a line of trust somewhere, else we lock ourselves in remote dwellings in central Montana and not interact with anyone. Them's the breaks.
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
And straight out of the FAQ:
Fairtunes currently charges 4% plus $0.25 per contribution.
This represents the raw cost of processing each transaction. [...] In the future however, with higher volume and a more streamlined distribution process, we hope to eliminate the service fee.
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. [...] All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands.
Other means like what? I suppose they could list the address of the artist, but you could find that out yourself, the way they do.
Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission! What can it hurt to have the musicians benefit some from the distribution of their music, given that it's happenning? Even better, we can leave the record companies out of it like we've always wanted to. How nice...
You're right, that is insightful. So insightful, that you decided to post this exact same comment here, here, here, here, here, here, and who knows how many other places, no matter how much or how little it actually had to do with the story.
You're probably conducting some sort of sociological experiment. See how people will moderate up what they don't understand, as long as you sound like you know what you're talking about.
Start me up Attention would-be artists. OW is looking for artwork. We want your ideas for startup/shudown and off screens. We will accept submissions until 15 August. At that time the public will vote on the winning screens. So what will it be?
Minimalist? Extravagant? You makethe call! Submissions must be 640x480 at 256 colors (16 color beauties will also be accepted). Send you compressed entry (jpeg, png, or zipped bitmap) to openwindows_2000@yahoo.com
Website making great progress The Open Windows website is making great progress adding a news section, a cleaner look and a great public face for the project.
Open Windows News The Open Windows News System has been installed successfully. Now the team leaders can post public news.
I'm afraid time has shown that any project concerned with a news system, development of their web site, and startup and shutdown screens (!) before having LOTS of code to show, doesn't have much promise.
I mean really:
From: <linus@torvolds.net> Date: Jun 30, 1993
Hello, I have an idea for a great OS. I have a website up, and a news system, and I just drew startup and shutdown screens. They're really cool. So anyway, I was thinking I'd write an OS. Who wants to jump on board?
I remember when I first read about Freedows. They had such lofty goals, and being rather new to the open source community and seeing the success of Linux, Apache, Perl, and the other biggies, I believed them when they said "We're confident that we'll have this done before the end of 1998." And then it wasn't. And then the website started saying things like "everyone knows this is just a hobby, right? If you're stressing out about it, talk to me, we'll find someone to pick up your slack."
Then came along Alliance OS. Seems a lot of disgruntled Freedows developers migrated to that project after Freedows flopped. It was the same idea, based on the Stanford Cache Kernel paper, except it didn't seem so intent on emulating Windows (though it allowed for writing a layer of compatibility). It seemed really to be going somewhere, with regular status updates, a web page for every subteam, apparently they even had a 1MB source archive. Unfortunately, about half a year ago, the status updates just stopped. The page is still up, you can check it out, but I'm afraid we can consider that one RIP as well. How sad.
I can speak from personal experience when I say that it's easy to look at the success of major open source projects and forget that the authors of them weren't home-educated, CS degree-less adolescents like I am. They were serious computer programmers who knew their stuff before they began. These projects didn't happen by magic, and they weren't effortless fun. Success takes real work. No one will magically write the next vim in a weekend.
I hope that OS development based on the Stanford Cache Kernel comes to be one day. Though I don't know enough about OS internals to understand the merits of it, from the way the FAQs for these projects would talk about it it sounds like a great idea.
Perhaps OS innovation doesn't belong in the open source community. Linux wasn't innovation, it was re-implementation. Maybe writing an open source OS at all is too much. Linus just happened to pick the perfect time in history, where interest was high enough and communication easy enough that a vacuum was filled. No new OS project these days will ever attract the mindshare Linux did (and still does).
I'd almost suggest that if these guys want something to do, that they go and grab the Alliance tarball and start hacking away, but their FTP server seems to be indefinitely down. Ah well...
This is exactly what I had in mind, and thanks for pointing me to it. My only comment is, why are you not batching the credit card transfers to help ease the overhead? Do you have plans to do this?
(Why the hell isn't this moderated through the ceiling? Here's our chance to TRULY make a statement!)
But you see, like I said in the original post, in the status quo music is getting distributed for free, whether the artist likes it or not. The effects of voluntary payment, at least at this stage in the game, can be only positive.
To those who would accuse me of being an "all talk, no action," let me add that I'd be perfectly willing to write the code for such a site (provided that the idea is on solid legal ground), but I have no graphic design skills nor the hardware and bandwidth neccesary for such an undertaking...
It's simple. Someone needs to set up a web site called paytheartists.com, or something similar. Anyone who wants to can pay any artist an amount of their choosing per song they download. All completely voluntary.
I could imagine an "about" page that reads something like this (please point out any innacuracies, either in law or in philosophy):
What is paytheartists.com?
Paytheartists.com is a site dedicated to compensating artists for their work without supporting the leeches who at this point in time are vigorously fighting what they correctly perceive to be a very serious threat to their monopoly. The premise is simple: music is available to internet users through Napster et al, and this site gives you the ability to compensate the respective artists a paltry sum per song.
The desired effect is to show musicians that the Internet can be an ideal way to distribute music while still making money off it, and without resorting to closed protocols that attempt to enforce compliance.
But what about people who won't voluntarily pay?
This is inevitable, and perhaps not all bad. First of all, there are children and others with limited incomes who don't have the money to spend in the first place, so this isn't lost revenue. Secondly, music lovers would hopefully be enthusiastic to reward music they like, and might perhaps contribute more for a song they especially like.
Aren't the activities you advocate illegal?
Yes. However, we believe them to be moral.
First of all, the operation of this site will not increase piracy. Napster and other music distribution systems make obtaining copyrighted music simple already, and anyone who wants music can get it. The effect of this site, therefore, is only positive, because we seek to take all the music "sharing" that is so widespread, and let the artists who created the work in the first place in on a little bit of the fun.
Secondly, we have absolutely no moral qualms about leaving the record companies out of this. They are so rich and powerful today only because they've had a complete stranglehold on the industry for so long, that any musician who wanted to be heard widespread had no choice but to go to a record company. Worse, these artists are now stuck because they don't own the rights to their own songs. Look on any CD, and you won't see (C) The Artist, but rather (C) The Big Record Company. Artists couldn't legally take their own music online now even if they wanted to.
The record companies are further working against the artists by refusing to budge an inch in regard to online distribution of music. The RIAA maintains to this day that it's illegal even to rip a CD you own to your own computer. A site like this would be completely unneccesary if they would simply embrace the advent of digital music instead of fighting it.
We challenge the RIAA to stand by their comments about their litigation being all in the name of the artist. If this site succeeds and begins compensating artists in significant amounts (and with the huge cut the record companies take, it should take too much money per song to get up to what the artist would make off a normal CD), the RIAA should be estatic that everything is working out so well. If they condemn it as a haven for pirates, they'll be caught in their own lie.
As far as I'm concerned it's simple. Since DVD is not a consumer friendly product, I refuse to buy into it. I won't buy a DVD-ROM, nor a DVD player, nor will I buy any DVDs.
Congratulations! Clap, Clap, Clap,encore!
You now comprise the.001% of the potential DVD market for whom the politics have any bearing at all on their purchasing decisions. And of them, you comprise the 10% who actually refuse to buy DVDs as a result (as you notice, even the extreme Slashdot anti-DVD crusade obviously wasn't important enough to prevent wide-eyed praise of MPAA member Disney for their DVD release of Princess Mononoke in Japanese or something (who knows, I'm no anime guy)).
Congratulations for not prostituting your ideals, but I hate to break it to you: the MPAA does not care about you one bit. Your boycott does not make a difference.
Perhaps you boycott simply because you coulnd't live with yourself seeing a DVD player proudly displayed atop your television. In that case, more power to you. But I hope you're not deluded into thinking that boycotts of you and people like you will bring the MPAA to its knees anytime soon. Boycotts must be MASSIVE before business even blinks an eye.
Do remember, however, that even though I drive a 1990 Toyota Camry, I can pop in ANY car and count on consistency. The gas will always be on the right. Steering wheel will always be right in front of me. Spedometer will always go clockwise smaller to larger numbers. Perhaps there are fringe exceptions, but part of the reason you only have to take driver's ed once is because cars are so similar in their operation.
Cars are several orders of magnitude simpler than computers. If a computer was a physical console, it would be monstrous, there are an almost infinite number of controls that exist on your computer that aren't directly visible. How many programs are in your path at the command line? Even if you use a windowing system, how many buttons and menu choices could you access if you navigated through all the menus? If there's not a standard way of accessing resources not directly visible to you, using a computer other than your own would be like completely starting over.
I'll grant that I don't know how involved the "user's own preferences" you propose would be. Preferences certainly exist today, in X more than any other system of course, but we're seeing that the price is complexity. Windows and the Mac are much easier to learn than X, because they are so standardized--you only need to learn things once. A new user obviously won't care (and should need to) what window manager they're running, what desktop environment this application belongs to, etc.
You mention skinning, and I fail to see how amazingly innovative skinning is. Skins in their present form (XMMS, Mozilla) are nothing but different ways of presenting the same information. So the button is blue with white stripes instead of grey. Maybe the buttons are arranged differently, I could almost see how this could help target different groups of users by stressing different parts of the UI. But we're still in the WIMP paradigm that has been only slightly modified since the original Macs.
I've thought about UI design changes a lot before. What I find more than anything is that it's very hard to think outside the box, because every computing task has been adapted to the current model, and so one involuntarily defaults to this mode of thinking. It's hard to imagine anything else.
One thought I've had is that since programs are written by programmers, they naturally think in terms of low-level concepts such as files, directories, input, output, etc. Almost every Windows Application in existence has a "File" menu with "Open," "Save," etc. This is a wonderful standard to have in terms of consistency in UI design, but it spotlights the fact that we adapt the application to the low-level concepts that support it, and not the other way around. Are there applications for which a "file" menu is not appropriate?
One thing I like about the article is that in looking for new ideas, it seeks to violate every one of the existing standards. Perhaps that's what needs to happen for innovation to take place. Also, in attempting to "think outside the box", we need to imagine different input and output devices. A mouse is well suited for the WIMP system, and relying on it as the primary input device somewhat locks us into it. What other kinds of devices could you dream up that could support other UI designs? A screen is the most standard output device obviously, and it's hard to fathom another, but again, what possiblities exist?
Disney's failed Toysmart.com has gotten the go-ahead from the Federal Trade Commission to sell its customer database as part of a bankruptcy sale, as long as the buyer agrees to abide by Toysmart's privacy policy.
Flashback to 3rd grade:
Chris the Coolster: Listen to this cool secret! But you can't tell anyone...
Lucy the Loser: I won't. You can count on me!
Later that day...
Lucy the Newly-Popular: Hey, listen to this! But you can't tell anyone...
ad infinitum, until the juicy tidbit is common knowledge.
This also enables easy NDA dodging! All I have to do is have anyone I share secret info with sign the NDA too! Sweet, time to get some ultra-secret specs and start writing some gfx card drivers for X...
Of course. More than anything, I was mocking the posts who were portraying Disney as being philanthropic and understanding for allowing us the privilege of buying what they make. As if they give a rats ass about anything but the money they'll make off it.
How nice of the gracious multinational corporation (as well as MPAA member) to allow us to fill their wallets in exchange for media we can only use on their draconian terms, further assisting them in their tyrannical court fight! Proof that execs really can be reasonable.
Do you have any idea just what a monster Mozilla is?
Mozilla is not just the next version of Netscape. It is completely different beast altogether.
Have you ever noticed that Mozilla looks decidedly different than any other app on your desktop? That's because it doesn't use any standard widget library (in the case of X), or the native OS widgets (in the case of Windows, BeOS, etc.) It's built its own set of widgets, with the goal of making them completely cross platform. Though it looks different than any other app on your desktop, a screenshot from the Windows version and the X version will look basically identical, with the obvious exception of the window decorations. That way people can easily write cross-platform web apps, with the assurance that they will look identical on any platform.
Yes, you heard me right, Mozilla is a complete framework for writing applications. You can write user interfaces in XUL (a language for describing widget layout in XML), change their appearance in CSS and code in JavaScript.
In fact, that's what the core browser interface is written in. Yep, everytime you hit the "back" button, Mozilla executes JavaScript to act on your request. Don't believe me? Go read all the *.js files in chrome/packages/core/navigator/content. If you feel like screwing with someone, take 2 minutes and switch the forward and back buttons, or make the stop button navigate to a porn site or something.
Don't get me wrong, the Mozilla project has ambitious goals, and what they're doing is exciting. But it would be nice to have a native, bare-bones browser too.
I worked for a web startup that ran IIS/MSSQL on NT. The instructions for setting up our system from scratch were 6+ pages long, and involved more than 8 reboots--the process took more than an hour to complete.
The guy who wrote the instructions said that any variance from the instructions (ie. installing Service Pack 3 AFTER SQL Server instead of before) would prevent the system from working at all. The reason why was anybody's guess.
In Linux, the entire process of building the system could have been reduced to a tarball and a shell script. The difference is unbelievable.
Integrating the core functionality so tightly with the GUI provides ZERO flexibility in trying to automate ANYTHING.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously haven't been here long. You obviously are still under the false impression that the patent office give one-half of a rat's ass (yes, that would be one rat butt cheek) whether it's patents are actually non-obvious.
For reference, read up on:
There are several more I can't think of at the moment...
--
I hope it has the capability to, upon making changes, show you exactly what it did. What files were changed, what was added or removed, and a quick little explanation of each change.
What better way to learn the fundamentals of system configuration?
--
Unfortunately Justin works for Nullsoft which is owned by AOL which in turn is part of TimeWarner which is a member of the RIAA.
I love how you make it sound like this happened by accident, or in a way that is out of poor Justin's control.
Nullsoft allowed themselves to be bought out! It's not as if they were chased into a corner and forced to sign the papers.
You have all the freedom you don't give away.
--
Is anyone else tired of Napster discussion being beaten to death? Nothing new comes from these new threads, every argument has been made, every position explored. All there is to be done now is to perhaps share different points of view with people who haven't heard it all ten THOUSAND times, and wait patiently.
--
Basically, as long as your spam has a valid From: address, "ADV" in the subject line, an opt-out mechanism, and doesn't forge header information or domain names, you can spam all you want. And that really doesn't do a whole hell of a lot of good IMHO.
Doesn't do a lot of good? Are you mad??
:0:
* ^Subject:.*ADV.*
/dev/null
...to never get spam in my inbox again. That would sure make ME a happy camper!
--
And what you want is technology that basically examines an open MP3 file that's being transferred to a portable device and decides whether or not it should be admitted to the portable device.
And so this portable device that I own, that I bought, that I'm holding in my hand, can still only be used in such a way that the people that I bought it from like.
What if gas stations sold gas that only worked if it was in a car? Oh, most people wouldn't have a problem, but what about the person who takes it out to a bonfire to start a fire? Why is the person I bought it from deciding how I should use it?
Unethical as it would be, it would be so tempting to play their game and fight stuff like this the dirty way. Write software that supposedly supports it, but is broken in some fundamental way. Circulate FUD. Circulate broken SDMI music files. Make it so damn difficult and impractical to use, that no one bothers to even try.
--
I apologize for my rudeness in my earlier post, I was annoyed at what seemed like a condescending lecture. I think I perceived it wrong.
That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.
Surely you can see the circular reasoning going on here. It's going to continue to suck for as long as no one uses it! We have the advantage of dealing with such small amounts of money--The service charges at this point are worth it to me to make a statement against the music industry, and place a small bet on the off-chance that this fairtunes thing goes big and gets press.
They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.
So why should we trust them?
Point taken. Personally, I trust them because I see them to be like me, young idealists who are disenchanted with the industry, and want to put enough time and resources into the project to make a company out of it. Naive? Perhaps, but like I said, there's so little money coming out of my pocket I'm willing to take a chance at the opportunity to make a statement.
At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.
Fairtunes is also brand new, and since its existence is based on this very idea, it can be tailored to make just this kind of transaction painless. They have plans in the works to write plugins for for the major media players that allow you to tip the artist when you play their song. Who else knows what they could come up with?
And any officially sanctioned scheme like you describe would legally have to involve the record company. So by participating in it I don't achieve my goal of excluding the record company.
Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it.
And I certainly would be less likely to tip musicians who had openly declared war on me.
But think about this: how likely are people going to be to try this until they're shown it works? Stephen King can afford to, and isn't bound by a draconian exclusive contract that forbids him from writing books on his own. I see this as the chance to show them it CAN work, and leave them with less reason to try and litigate against me. Of course the leeches at the RIAA will still try, but how will anyone take their rhetoric about it being "for the artist" seriously if the artists don't support their actions?
...reading your essay now, but there'd be no way to finish it and the comment on it before this discussion thread was dead...
--
Don't worry, I read it. The fact still remains, however, that you've never seen the metal, and the principle still remains that everyone must draw a line of trust somewhere, else we lock ourselves in remote dwellings in central Montana and not interact with anyone. Them's the breaks.
--
4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.
And straight out of the FAQ:
If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. [...] All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.
Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.
If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands.
Other means like what? I suppose they could list the address of the artist, but you could find that out yourself, the way they do.
Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing
Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?
Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.
This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission! What can it hurt to have the musicians benefit some from the distribution of their music, given that it's happenning? Even better, we can leave the record companies out of it like we've always wanted to. How nice...
--
You're right, that is insightful. So insightful, that you decided to post this exact same comment here, here, here, here, here, here, and who knows how many other places, no matter how much or how little it actually had to do with the story.
You're probably conducting some sort of sociological experiment. See how people will moderate up what they don't understand, as long as you sound like you know what you're talking about.
I guess you win.
--
Start me up
Attention would-be artists.
OW is looking for artwork. We want
your ideas for startup/shudown and
off screens. We will accept
submissions until 15 August. At that
time the public will vote on the
winning screens. So what will it be?
Minimalist? Extravagant?
You makethe call! Submissions must be
640x480 at 256 colors (16 color
beauties will also be accepted). Send
you compressed entry (jpeg, png, or
zipped bitmap) to
openwindows_2000@yahoo.com
Website making great progress
The Open Windows website is making
great progress adding a news
section, a cleaner look and a great
public face for the project.
Open Windows News
The Open Windows News System has
been installed successfully. Now the
team leaders can post public news.
I'm afraid time has shown that any project concerned with a news system, development of their web site, and startup and shutdown screens (!) before having LOTS of code to show, doesn't have much promise.
I mean really:
From: <linus@torvolds.net>
Date: Jun 30, 1993
Hello, I have an idea for a great OS. I have a website up, and a news system, and I just drew startup and shutdown screens. They're really cool. So anyway, I was thinking I'd write an OS. Who wants to jump on board?
Linus
--
I remember when I first read about Freedows. They had such lofty goals, and being rather new to the open source community and seeing the success of Linux, Apache, Perl, and the other biggies, I believed them when they said "We're confident that we'll have this done before the end of 1998." And then it wasn't. And then the website started saying things like "everyone knows this is just a hobby, right? If you're stressing out about it, talk to me, we'll find someone to pick up your slack."
Then came along Alliance OS. Seems a lot of disgruntled Freedows developers migrated to that project after Freedows flopped. It was the same idea, based on the Stanford Cache Kernel paper, except it didn't seem so intent on emulating Windows (though it allowed for writing a layer of compatibility). It seemed really to be going somewhere, with regular status updates, a web page for every subteam, apparently they even had a 1MB source archive. Unfortunately, about half a year ago, the status updates just stopped. The page is still up, you can check it out, but I'm afraid we can consider that one RIP as well. How sad.
I can speak from personal experience when I say that it's easy to look at the success of major open source projects and forget that the authors of them weren't home-educated, CS degree-less adolescents like I am. They were serious computer programmers who knew their stuff before they began. These projects didn't happen by magic, and they weren't effortless fun. Success takes real work. No one will magically write the next vim in a weekend.
I hope that OS development based on the Stanford Cache Kernel comes to be one day. Though I don't know enough about OS internals to understand the merits of it, from the way the FAQs for these projects would talk about it it sounds like a great idea.
Perhaps OS innovation doesn't belong in the open source community. Linux wasn't innovation, it was re-implementation. Maybe writing an open source OS at all is too much. Linus just happened to pick the perfect time in history, where interest was high enough and communication easy enough that a vacuum was filled. No new OS project these days will ever attract the mindshare Linux did (and still does).
I'd almost suggest that if these guys want something to do, that they go and grab the Alliance tarball and start hacking away, but their FTP server seems to be indefinitely down. Ah well...
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Fantastic.
Perfect.
This is exactly what I had in mind, and thanks for pointing me to it. My only comment is, why are you not batching the credit card transfers to help ease the overhead? Do you have plans to do this?
(Why the hell isn't this moderated through the ceiling? Here's our chance to TRULY make a statement!)
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But as far as I can see there is no moral right to have free music that someone else made.
Funny you mention that, because that's exactly what the record labels do.
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But you see, like I said in the original post, in the status quo music is getting distributed for free, whether the artist likes it or not. The effects of voluntary payment, at least at this stage in the game, can be only positive.
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To those who would accuse me of being an "all talk, no action," let me add that I'd be perfectly willing to write the code for such a site (provided that the idea is on solid legal ground), but I have no graphic design skills nor the hardware and bandwidth neccesary for such an undertaking...
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It's simple. Someone needs to set up a web site called paytheartists.com, or something similar. Anyone who wants to can pay any artist an amount of their choosing per song they download. All completely voluntary.
I could imagine an "about" page that reads something like this (please point out any innacuracies, either in law or in philosophy):
What is paytheartists.com?
Paytheartists.com is a site dedicated to compensating artists for their work without supporting the leeches who at this point in time are vigorously fighting what they correctly perceive to be a very serious threat to their monopoly. The premise is simple: music is available to internet users through Napster et al, and this site gives you the ability to compensate the respective artists a paltry sum per song.
The desired effect is to show musicians that the Internet can be an ideal way to distribute music while still making money off it, and without resorting to closed protocols that attempt to enforce compliance.
But what about people who won't voluntarily pay?
This is inevitable, and perhaps not all bad. First of all, there are children and others with limited incomes who don't have the money to spend in the first place, so this isn't lost revenue. Secondly, music lovers would hopefully be enthusiastic to reward music they like, and might perhaps contribute more for a song they especially like.
Aren't the activities you advocate illegal?
Yes. However, we believe them to be moral.
First of all, the operation of this site will not increase piracy. Napster and other music distribution systems make obtaining copyrighted music simple already, and anyone who wants music can get it. The effect of this site, therefore, is only positive, because we seek to take all the music "sharing" that is so widespread, and let the artists who created the work in the first place in on a little bit of the fun.
Secondly, we have absolutely no moral qualms about leaving the record companies out of this. They are so rich and powerful today only because they've had a complete stranglehold on the industry for so long, that any musician who wanted to be heard widespread had no choice but to go to a record company. Worse, these artists are now stuck because they don't own the rights to their own songs. Look on any CD, and you won't see (C) The Artist, but rather (C) The Big Record Company. Artists couldn't legally take their own music online now even if they wanted to.
The record companies are further working against the artists by refusing to budge an inch in regard to online distribution of music. The RIAA maintains to this day that it's illegal even to rip a CD you own to your own computer. A site like this would be completely unneccesary if they would simply embrace the advent of digital music instead of fighting it.
We challenge the RIAA to stand by their comments about their litigation being all in the name of the artist. If this site succeeds and begins compensating artists in significant amounts (and with the huge cut the record companies take, it should take too much money per song to get up to what the artist would make off a normal CD), the RIAA should be estatic that everything is working out so well. If they condemn it as a haven for pirates, they'll be caught in their own lie.
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As far as I'm concerned it's simple. Since DVD is not a consumer friendly product, I refuse to buy into it. I won't buy a DVD-ROM, nor a DVD player, nor will I buy any DVDs.
.001% of the potential DVD market for whom the politics have any bearing at all on their purchasing decisions. And of them, you comprise the 10% who actually refuse to buy DVDs as a result (as you notice, even the extreme Slashdot anti-DVD crusade obviously wasn't important enough to prevent wide-eyed praise of MPAA member Disney for their DVD release of Princess Mononoke in Japanese or something (who knows, I'm no anime guy)).
Congratulations! Clap, Clap, Clap, encore!
You now comprise the
Congratulations for not prostituting your ideals, but I hate to break it to you: the MPAA does not care about you one bit. Your boycott does not make a difference.
Perhaps you boycott simply because you coulnd't live with yourself seeing a DVD player proudly displayed atop your television. In that case, more power to you. But I hope you're not deluded into thinking that boycotts of you and people like you will bring the MPAA to its knees anytime soon. Boycotts must be MASSIVE before business even blinks an eye.
Do remember, however, that even though I drive a 1990 Toyota Camry, I can pop in ANY car and count on consistency. The gas will always be on the right. Steering wheel will always be right in front of me. Spedometer will always go clockwise smaller to larger numbers. Perhaps there are fringe exceptions, but part of the reason you only have to take driver's ed once is because cars are so similar in their operation.
Cars are several orders of magnitude simpler than computers. If a computer was a physical console, it would be monstrous, there are an almost infinite number of controls that exist on your computer that aren't directly visible. How many programs are in your path at the command line? Even if you use a windowing system, how many buttons and menu choices could you access if you navigated through all the menus? If there's not a standard way of accessing resources not directly visible to you, using a computer other than your own would be like completely starting over.
I'll grant that I don't know how involved the "user's own preferences" you propose would be. Preferences certainly exist today, in X more than any other system of course, but we're seeing that the price is complexity. Windows and the Mac are much easier to learn than X, because they are so standardized--you only need to learn things once. A new user obviously won't care (and should need to) what window manager they're running, what desktop environment this application belongs to, etc.
You mention skinning, and I fail to see how amazingly innovative skinning is. Skins in their present form (XMMS, Mozilla) are nothing but different ways of presenting the same information. So the button is blue with white stripes instead of grey. Maybe the buttons are arranged differently, I could almost see how this could help target different groups of users by stressing different parts of the UI. But we're still in the WIMP paradigm that has been only slightly modified since the original Macs.
I've thought about UI design changes a lot before. What I find more than anything is that it's very hard to think outside the box, because every computing task has been adapted to the current model, and so one involuntarily defaults to this mode of thinking. It's hard to imagine anything else.
One thought I've had is that since programs are written by programmers, they naturally think in terms of low-level concepts such as files, directories, input, output, etc. Almost every Windows Application in existence has a "File" menu with "Open," "Save," etc. This is a wonderful standard to have in terms of consistency in UI design, but it spotlights the fact that we adapt the application to the low-level concepts that support it, and not the other way around. Are there applications for which a "file" menu is not appropriate?
One thing I like about the article is that in looking for new ideas, it seeks to violate every one of the existing standards. Perhaps that's what needs to happen for innovation to take place. Also, in attempting to "think outside the box", we need to imagine different input and output devices. A mouse is well suited for the WIMP system, and relying on it as the primary input device somewhat locks us into it. What other kinds of devices could you dream up that could support other UI designs? A screen is the most standard output device obviously, and it's hard to fathom another, but again, what possiblities exist?
Disney's failed Toysmart.com has gotten the go-ahead from the Federal Trade Commission to sell its customer database as part of a bankruptcy sale, as long as the buyer agrees to abide by Toysmart's privacy policy.
Flashback to 3rd grade:
Chris the Coolster: Listen to this cool secret! But you can't tell anyone...
Lucy the Loser: I won't. You can count on me!
Later that day...
Lucy the Newly-Popular: Hey, listen to this! But you can't tell anyone...
ad infinitum, until the juicy tidbit is common knowledge.
This also enables easy NDA dodging! All I have to do is have anyone I share secret info with sign the NDA too! Sweet, time to get some ultra-secret specs and start writing some gfx card drivers for X...
(Yes, I know the spaces would prevent it from being parsed that way, just chuckle for a second and move along...)
Of course. More than anything, I was mocking the posts who were portraying Disney as being philanthropic and understanding for allowing us the privilege of buying what they make. As if they give a rats ass about anything but the money they'll make off it.
How nice of the gracious multinational corporation (as well as MPAA member) to allow us to fill their wallets in exchange for media we can only use on their draconian terms, further assisting them in their tyrannical court fight! Proof that execs really can be reasonable.
Do you have any idea just what a monster Mozilla is?
Mozilla is not just the next version of Netscape. It is completely different beast altogether.
Have you ever noticed that Mozilla looks decidedly different than any other app on your desktop? That's because it doesn't use any standard widget library (in the case of X), or the native OS widgets (in the case of Windows, BeOS, etc.) It's built its own set of widgets, with the goal of making them completely cross platform. Though it looks different than any other app on your desktop, a screenshot from the Windows version and the X version will look basically identical, with the obvious exception of the window decorations. That way people can easily write cross-platform web apps, with the assurance that they will look identical on any platform.
Yes, you heard me right, Mozilla is a complete framework for writing applications. You can write user interfaces in XUL (a language for describing widget layout in XML), change their appearance in CSS and code in JavaScript.
In fact, that's what the core browser interface is written in. Yep, everytime you hit the "back" button, Mozilla executes JavaScript to act on your request. Don't believe me? Go read all the *.js files in chrome/packages/core/navigator/content. If you feel like screwing with someone, take 2 minutes and switch the forward and back buttons, or make the stop button navigate to a porn site or something.
Don't get me wrong, the Mozilla project has ambitious goals, and what they're doing is exciting. But it would be nice to have a native, bare-bones browser too.
I agree completely.
I worked for a web startup that ran IIS/MSSQL on NT. The instructions for setting up our system from scratch were 6+ pages long, and involved more than 8 reboots--the process took more than an hour to complete.
The guy who wrote the instructions said that any variance from the instructions (ie. installing Service Pack 3 AFTER SQL Server instead of before) would prevent the system from working at all. The reason why was anybody's guess.
In Linux, the entire process of building the system could have been reduced to a tarball and a shell script. The difference is unbelievable.
Integrating the core functionality so tightly with the GUI provides ZERO flexibility in trying to automate ANYTHING.