It seems in every single thread thread regarding injustice there is one American who thinks that the right way to get something done is to cut down a few trees and send them to Washington where they can be at best filed and most probably thrown away. If anything, the dangerous sentiment here is the idea that writing to your leaders will accomplish anything what so ever.
This is not complaining about about the speed limit in your state, or even about some company killing spotted owls. This is the real thing, true revolution that is going to change the entire way our world and economy works, and democracy will not serve us here.
Our side of this argument basically amounts to removing copyright laws. This would be the biggest, most radical, and most painful political desition made since Lincoln abolished slavery in America or maybe since the allies went to war over Poland. We are not up against a million, or even a billion dollars of interests, we are up against trillions and trillions.
No, talk and Slashdot discussion will not help much. But nor will writing a bunch of useless letters to corrupt and snug polititions.
But fact is that civil disobedience might. For every program they ban, we up the ant and make them ban something else. It's progress by pain, but we do still live in democracies, so if we can drive the government to the point where the violations start to hurt the general populace, only then we can suddenly turn and face the idiots in power.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I read somewhere that the most popular IMAX movies generally gross a lot more than the hollywood films do, and that many of them (the Antartic one, I think) do better than even blockbusters like Titanic did.
So why not privately fund a mission (manned or unmanned) into deep space and make an Imax movie about it. I mean, imagine the visuals of a space probe who's purpose it is to bring back visually stunning footage, who would not want to see it?
I realize that such a mission would probably not get as much done scientifically as the NASA missions do, but at least it is something. But, if you ask me, it seems like a much more viable way to commericially fund space travel than space tourism.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm against commercial monopolies. Or rather, since you are 100% right that monoplies just don't happen on the Internet, I'm against the idea stuck in every PHB's head up to the truly evil ones(tm) like Case, Bezos, Jobs, McNealy, and Gates, that appropiating and monopolizing peoples lives is a good idea. I'm against the fact that streaming video, internet phone, instant messaging, and a lot of other things could be as native to the Internet as the web is today if every single Internet company (from the most titanic Microsoft to the most dimminutive Napster) didn't live under the notion that they have to control, rather than support, their protocols.
And this is not me asking companies to do a lot of work and then give away the result either. There are viable standards for streaming media in the mpeg family of codecs, but MS, Apple, and Real Networks are working continually _against_ them. And any half talented programmer could create an IM standard if any of the portals wanted to support it rather than bicker amongst eachother.
I'm still looking for the next mail, or the next web, or even the next irc, but I'm seeing nothing. Just a bunch of corporate idiots showing off about their "excellent patented proprietary solutions".
So I'll end my rant with a plea to the young innovators reading Slashdot: if you do come up with the next great Internet invention, do yourself a favour and make it free. Marc Andersen is no longer working with Netscape, the inventors of ICQ are drones to AOL, and Metcalf was forced out of 3Com many many years ago. But Linus still heads the kernel, and Tim Berners Lee is in charge of W3C. They may not be millionaires, but they aren't starving, and at least they are still doing what they love, and working with the babies of their brilliance. Choose as you will.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
At the risk of being a heretic, I would like to say that this is a symptom of a much larger problem than whether Linux users can play some streaming media or not. Basically, the whole key to the freedom and success of the Internet has been that the protocols, which date back to the pre-billion-dollar-dot-com-marketcap days, have been open and standardized. It is very concerning that this is not the case for many of the protocols that will be important on the Internet of tomorrow.
Streaming media may or may not be a big deal (on the one hand Real Networks and Microsoft are both evil as sin, on the other, how long until we can just stream with the semi-open mpeg standard instead?) but there are certainly other protocols that are. Is there any standard for Voice over IP? Are these open? Or just look at instant messaging. Flash. Secure communications.
Sooner or later the services that make up the Internet today are going to fade into obscurity and be replaced by whatever comes next. However, it seems that ever since commercial interest came to the Internet, they have not been able to agree on one single standard. Is the future of the Internet going to be one perpetual standards war because everyone believes that a monopoly is the only way to do bussiness?
I believe very firmly that this has already hurt the Internet and it's developement. Why has there not been a single new standard service since the WWW? Why has the last ten years seen the least developement of new innovations on the Internet although more money has been spent on it then every before?
Of course, as always our hope lies in that the Open Source revolution can convince companies that terms like "proprietary" and "patented" are everything but marketing catch phrases, and that fostering freedom is the only way to be successful on the Internet. But as long as Steve Case is looked up to as the archetype Internet executive, I wouldn't hold my breath.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Exactly who is the end user you are worrying about here? People with severe arthritis or carpal tunnel? People who use their feet to navigate their menus? Maybe if you were using a decent mouse instead of that iMac puck thing...
I have my 87 year old Grandmother using a windows box. She has trouble with a lot of things, but even she can place the mouse over the menus correctly.
Or, point by point:
Menubars are not placed at the top of the screen, making them harder to hit (remember, a menubar in the middle of the screen has finite dimensions, whereas a menubar at the top of the screen has infinite depth).
To start with there is a setting to get the menus up at the top (Mac style) in KDE. Of course, it sucks because it means you have to move the mouse a lot more to reach the menus, so no one in their right mind would use it.
The taskbar on the bottom of the screen has buttons that do not extend all the way to the edge of the screen, again denying them of a potential infinite depth and making them harder to hit.
Um, as I write this I have 16 windows on the taskbar. Thank god that they are all not crammed in on the bottom, or I wouldn't be able to see what a single one of them was doing.
In many window managers, nondestructive buttons such as Maximize are placed right next to destructive buttons such as Close, increasing the chances that the user will accidentally destroy a window.
Again, even my grandmother can hit these buttons, so can you. I promise.
To proceed from a menu to a submenu, it is necessary to manuever the mouse rightward with surgical precision through a single menu line in order to get to the submenu without accidentally tripping an adjacent menu item. Compare this design with the classic Macintosh menus, which provide a triangular "forgiveness zone" to make it easy to get to the submenu without closing it before you get there.
Umm, because you are a Mac user you think you have to hold the mouse down the whole time while using the menu, which you don't in Windows or in most window managers. Just click on the menu, and behold, it stays open. Move to the submenu (you can move the curser 16 laps around the screen on the way if that gets you going) and click on it. It will open too!
The Mac desktop is ANYTHING but ideal for todays computer usage. The position of the shortcuts (open the tiny little Apple menu) stinks, as does having to use a menu to change tasks, as does having to move the curser out of the window to get the menus. For anyone will to give them half a chance, the best of the Linux window managers are vastly superior in almost every way.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Sweden does have it's problems. Like any country that is faced with a fall in wealth (from the top to the bottom of the OECD in 25 years), and large social shifts from an extremely homogenus population to one of Europes most culturally diverse (of course, I believe this to be a good thing), we have our fair share of both segregation and bitterness.
However, the Swedish neo-Nazi threat is actually overhyped by a somewhat manic Swedish press and media. Most Swedes are very open by nature, and unlike many other European countries (Denmark, Austria, Italy) there is no extreme right party even close to reaching the parlament here. Even whispering something xenophobic in public is political suicide among the vast majority here, something which is obviously far from the case in a lot of other places.
If anything, our problem is not the widespread adoption of hatred, but inability of our legal system to do deal with criminal elements that gravitate toward this sort of behaviour in any country. The number of neo-Nazis in Sweden is probably no more than in the hundreds, and they are almost all criminal to begin with and would be in prison on other charges if the Swedish police and courts were even remotely doing their jobs.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
If I woke up as CmdrTaco and found this news I would post it too before having seen that it was already posted during the night. Its an emotional issue, probably the most important one ever to have the Linux and Slashdot communities at the center. This fight is about our right to be who we are, and persecution 16 year old - for no other reason then that he and his friends were smarter than a multi-billion dollar industry - must never be forgotten.
The article from Norwegian CNN looks like the same one that was linked from the last thread from Norwegian newspaper VG. Someone posted a translation here. It is a pretty good article, and includes Jon correction that DeCSS is not "a crack that allows copying of DVDs", but "a crack that allows _playing_ of DVDs". We have to continue to spread that message whenever we talk the press. This is not, and was never, about piracy.
This does mean war people, and it is just the beginning. The Information society _cannot_ both preserve the flows of information and enforce the appropriation of it, and as long as industry and government continues to kling to this contradiction, the costs to freedom will be without limit. As of yet, these are only a few paranoid associations who have not yet been actually threatened to the life: and yet they are ready to take it to the level of abusing the rights of a 16 year old. When the shit truly hits the fan, everything we love here stands to be lost.
I'm very afraid that when the overhyped overpriced Internet companies of today cannot live up to the growth and revenue they have promised, we will become the scapegoats. If your information company is loosing money, blame piracy and try to get the punishments lifted. If your Internet company is loosing money, blame cacheing, deep linking, and the use of Agents until it becomes illegal to link to a page on the WWW without permission (a violation of the very idea behind the media, not to speak of Freedom). If your tech company isn't making money, try to increase the already outdated patent laws beyond any possible rhyme and reason.
Can they win? Of course not. The genie is out of the bottle, and now that we have had glimpse of Freedom, we will never be giving up. The question is how much damage they can do to the world on the way down, and the answer is frightening.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm wondering whether the DVD-CA isn't holding its own members behind the light on this point as well as us. Most Movie exececutives are not likely to be technical, and believed the DVD consortsium's lie that CCS would help against copying (NOTHING helps against bit by bit copying).
Now DeCSS comes along, which doesn't change the situation on making pirate copies of DVDs, but does make it possible for anybody to build a player without the need for the DVD-CA. Should DeCSS become excepted, the DVD-CA would be out of a job. This is also the reason why they are attacking it legally. They know that whatever the do to poor Jon is not going to keep DeCSS out of the hands of pirates, but it will keep the css-auth code and keys underground, so anybody wanting to make a legal player will have to continue going to the DVD-CA.
The movie companies, stupid and scared shitless of piracy as they are, are falling for that this is actually in their interest, when it helps them very little. In many ways they are the most decieved of all...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Sorry, but you cannot whine about having a standard time that requires a minute understanding of the way timezones and daylight savings work (do you really want to go through life not understanding something so simple?) and get away with your intellectual dignity.
If you want to complain about something, complain about why we have Daylight Savings time to begin with. When was last time you needed to milk the cow in the morning? I would sure as hell rather be without it, and I'm on the eightieth parallel.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Wow, that was not very intelligent. Here's a hint:
Not everyone changes to daylight savings at the same time.
Europe does it at a different time then America, for example. Some places don't change at all (the Sun times don't vary much in Kenya). And (by golly!) in the Southern Hemisphere they actually set the clock forward during our winter months!
It's not to difficult to remember either: the cows need milking earlier in the summer, so you set the watch forward. That makes you one hour closer to GMT (but it makes me one hour further away! OMG!)
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Umm, did you read the first paragraph? I believe that we can't save ourselves by ignorance, and that we should always look to new ways to solve the new problems created by technology. If it turns out that technology lets gets us to the point where we erradicate ourselves, then so be it. I'm 100% in support of Nano-tech, nuclear research, cloning, bio-engineering, and anything else that we can think of.
But I wasn't arguing my opinion, just making an observation...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm not someone who advocates trying to resist the progress of technology, I believe we have to embrace it and change our lives accordingly, but its interesting that Nano-technology research is not more controversial considering the possible dangers involved.
The "dangers" involved in debated and even banned areas such as human cloning, bio engineering, and true AI are really pretty small compared with Nanotech, where one invisibly small nanomachine, programmed to multiply and destroy its host could eradicate life on earth and still not stop. Does Clinton want to be known for having started a second Manhattan project (I suppose it is a lot better than what he will most likely be known for)?
And the prospect of Nanotech has some _very_ interesting implications on the current RIAA, MPAA, and other "evil forces of the world" situation with the freedom of Information. When nanotech comes along, will we have a Copyright Act that forbids programming nanomachines to work-around "nano-scan protection systems"? Will Ford sue me for writing a Nano-assembler that can make a copy of your neighbors Mustang? Will Coca-Cola go after me for having bought one bottle and then copied it to all my friends at the party? And most importantly, if its true as the Copyright defenders say, that copy protection is necessary for the economy to work, will society then end with Nanotech? Maybe all the companies that produce physcial items ought to be out lobbying congress to not spend another cent on Nano-research, which could cripple their bussiness!!!
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
4Front have had drivers for Vortex in OpenSound for the last half a year, and they worked quite well for the week one is allowed to test them. The OpenSound package + Aureal drivers costed $30 however, so you might as well have bought a Soundblaster PCI 128 (yes, the Aureals are better, but the OpenSound drivers don't have any of the features anyways).
Now Aureal have finally come through and released real drivers for the kernel (better late then never, but still to late to be easily forgiveable). According the the email they sent me about this (I have been hounding them about the lack of Linux drivers for a while) they will go on to OpenSource the drivers as well (I think the page says as much).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The first article in this "series" contained a very enlightened post by someone (which was quickly moderated to the top) saying that the main reason Katz is flamed is because he preaches rather than takes part in the discussion, and that he never seems to notice the hundreds of insightful comments made after every one of his posts.
And, lo and behold, he has now gotten to the third installment of this pulpet marathon, and I have heard nothing from him about this. Katz doesn't even seem to acknowledge that although he loves to use himself and the Slashdot community as an example, he has never even made an effort (save one article about trying to install Linux) to be PART of the Slashdot community.
People do not flame because they are sexually understimulated or beat up in school or whatever theory I can't bring myself to care that Katz believes in, but they do so to get attention. If you behave like a higher power, never talking to, but rather at, others, of course you will flamed because you show that that is what is necessary to get your attention.
I have posted several hundred comments to this forum, and probably gotten as many replies and moderator points (for better or worse). Yet I cannot bring myself to recall EVER being flamed here. Not once. The only people who I see getting flamed here are the really dominant seminal posters like Signal11, but even then it is rather mild.
What makes you think, Jon Katz, that the "women and old people" that you prejudicely assume break down when insulted, are going to come into a community and start preaching at it from above, rather than starting by lurking, and then posting "from below" so to speak, as ten years of practice in netiquette have taught me is the right technique? Maybe you should look at yourself to see where the flaming problem begins, and not follow the philosophy of always blaming others so entrenched in the world about which you love to preach...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
In the Wallstreet bull market, many companies that are grotesquely over valued (and yes, that does include two Linux companies) often have their market caps defended by the fact that they could see "network effects" or "explosive growth". For Linuxcare to end up being valued as highly as Redhat and VA are today however, there would have to be the expectation that soon they would have more Linux consultants onboard then their are Linux users today (ok, not quite, but still). Consultant companies see neither network effects or value increases of their holdings and products, all they can do to make more money is hire more employees. I think that is worth considering when investing in this company.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No your missing the point. Anytime you are trying to rule over others, you are loosing your benevolence in somebody's eyes. You happen to think that people should get to do whatever they want "unless they are hurting other people" but not everyone agrees with that and might find you a terrible despot once in power. In fairness "hurting other people" is very vague as well. Is hitting somebody hurting people? Stealing stuff? Sleeping with somebody's wife? Pirate copying Windows 98?
It's not like Bill Gates is out there killing people or something, he just wants to put a computer in every house in every desk or whatever, which isn't very evil as far as visions go. He believes he has the right to act out of protection when Microsoft is threatened because the bigger and more dominant Microsoft becomes, the better the world will be.
Missing the point is thinking that there is, or could ever be, such a thing as a benevolent despot.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Whether a despot is benevolent or not is in the eye of the beholder. Contrary to what a lot of people in the world like to think, there are no absolute morals to decide this type of thing.
I have often argued that I think Bill Gates does believe himself to be a benevolent despot. He thinks he is doing the world a favour by taking power for himself, and that is why the whole antitrust trial frustrated him so much. In his own mind, he does have good intentions, and doesn't appply force when he doesn't have to. That you and I don't happen to agree (because on the whole we don't agree with his goals or methods) doesn't really change that.
Because people are different and freedom is fragile, infringing on our basic freedoms is bad even if the intentions are good.
If Linus is a benevolent despot, then he is a despot of a country with no borders, no laws, no police, and no currency. Except for occasional events, the only thing Despot Linus actually involves himself in is the national infrastructure, and even in that he works together with the populous ("so you built a bridge hu? Lets see if we cannot run a highway by it"). The royal roads are tollfree, kept clean by volunteers, and everyone is expected to take responsibility for themselves (well, not all, there are of course bus and train companies like "VA" and "Redhat"). Today he offered a decree that we try not to spoil the national name.
He, maybe I got a little carried of on that metaphor...:-)
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I usually agree completely with everything that BS writes (and I was pleased to see that his first paragraph validated my Slashdot post in the nCipher string), I do think that he is being a little hypocritical about this subject. While the whole nCipher thing was obviously just "hacksationalism", it seems to me that the dividing line between cases where he is and isn't OK with publishing cracks depends competely on where party is making money or not.
Ethics to the side, and as much as we all love being closet-Socialists here, capitalism is what makes our world go round. I wish all research could be funded for altruistic reasons, but in the real world the lure of profit IS often necessary. This is why we stand the fact that medical patents often keep poor people from being able to afford treatment, its for the greater good of having the medicines developed at all.
It might not be perfect to have companies researching for security holes so they can validate the sales of there products, but at least the holes are being found and published, which, IMHO, is a hell of lot better then letting them linger until somebody who would rather use them than publish them finds them. Use Open Source and you can be sure you can patch around before the hackers hit you when the problem hits the press.
I also see no mention in the article about BS own new Internet security company, Counterpane Internet Security, and how he plans to change his behaviour now (though he points fingers at LOFT for doing the same). He might have discussed this before though.
If anything, I think one of the biggest faulty parties here is Slashdot. A lot of journalists read this site, so when the editors post a story like the nCipher one, it does a great deal to spread it further. May I recommend that the/. staff consider taking a Cypherpunk onboard to weed through stories about such issues to make sure they are real and not just sensationlist.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No traditional corporate executive in America was smart enough then to harness the Internet. Anyone already running a profitable company would be mad to risk the whole thing on an unknown that might cost hundreds of millions of dollars before turning a profit. And if the executive wanted to, he likely would have been fired by the stockholders, management team or board of directors.
Actually that is not quite true, one did. As much as we all love to hate him and his company, he has to be given credit for that.
I think that as much as it shows the inability of Bill Gates as and innovator that he was among the last to spot the Internet even from his chair, it shows his brilliance as a bussiness man that he dared turn his company around on a dime. If Time-Warner had had that, they would not have known the fate of Mirabilis, Nullsoft and Netscape today...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean 21 years?
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
It seems in every single thread thread regarding injustice there is one American who thinks that the right way to get something done is to cut down a few trees and send them to Washington where they can be at best filed and most probably thrown away. If anything, the dangerous sentiment here is the idea that writing to your leaders will accomplish anything what so ever.
This is not complaining about about the speed limit in your state, or even about some company killing spotted owls. This is the real thing, true revolution that is going to change the entire way our world and economy works, and democracy will not serve us here.
Our side of this argument basically amounts to removing copyright laws. This would be the biggest, most radical, and most painful political desition made since Lincoln abolished slavery in America or maybe since the allies went to war over Poland. We are not up against a million, or even a billion dollars of interests, we are up against trillions and trillions.
No, talk and Slashdot discussion will not help much. But nor will writing a bunch of useless letters to corrupt and snug polititions.
But fact is that civil disobedience might. For every program they ban, we up the ant and make them ban something else. It's progress by pain, but we do still live in democracies, so if we can drive the government to the point where the violations start to hurt the general populace, only then we can suddenly turn and face the idiots in power.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
People, weren't we going to boycott the MPAA?
I guess we really do have the 20 second attention span that most modern movies assume of us.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I read somewhere that the most popular IMAX movies generally gross a lot more than the hollywood films do, and that many of them (the Antartic one, I think) do better than even blockbusters like Titanic did.
So why not privately fund a mission (manned or unmanned) into deep space and make an Imax movie about it. I mean, imagine the visuals of a space probe who's purpose it is to bring back visually stunning footage, who would not want to see it?
I realize that such a mission would probably not get as much done scientifically as the NASA missions do, but at least it is something. But, if you ask me, it seems like a much more viable way to commericially fund space travel than space tourism.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm not against commercialism or monopolies.
I'm against commercial monopolies. Or rather, since you are 100% right that monoplies just don't happen on the Internet, I'm against the idea stuck in every PHB's head up to the truly evil ones(tm) like Case, Bezos, Jobs, McNealy, and Gates, that appropiating and monopolizing peoples lives is a good idea. I'm against the fact that streaming video, internet phone, instant messaging, and a lot of other things could be as native to the Internet as the web is today if every single Internet company (from the most titanic Microsoft to the most dimminutive Napster) didn't live under the notion that they have to control, rather than support, their protocols.
And this is not me asking companies to do a lot of work and then give away the result either. There are viable standards for streaming media in the mpeg family of codecs, but MS, Apple, and Real Networks are working continually _against_ them. And any half talented programmer could create an IM standard if any of the portals wanted to support it rather than bicker amongst eachother.
I'm still looking for the next mail, or the next web, or even the next irc, but I'm seeing nothing. Just a bunch of corporate idiots showing off about their "excellent patented proprietary solutions".
So I'll end my rant with a plea to the young innovators reading Slashdot: if you do come up with the next great Internet invention, do yourself a favour and make it free. Marc Andersen is no longer working with Netscape, the inventors of ICQ are drones to AOL, and Metcalf was forced out of 3Com many many years ago. But Linus still heads the kernel, and Tim Berners Lee is in charge of W3C. They may not be millionaires, but they aren't starving, and at least they are still doing what they love, and working with the babies of their brilliance. Choose as you will.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
At the risk of being a heretic, I would like to say that this is a symptom of a much larger problem than whether Linux users can play some streaming media or not. Basically, the whole key to the freedom and success of the Internet has been that the protocols, which date back to the pre-billion-dollar-dot-com-marketcap days, have been open and standardized. It is very concerning that this is not the case for many of the protocols that will be important on the Internet of tomorrow.
Streaming media may or may not be a big deal (on the one hand Real Networks and Microsoft are both evil as sin, on the other, how long until we can just stream with the semi-open mpeg standard instead?) but there are certainly other protocols that are. Is there any standard for Voice over IP? Are these open? Or just look at instant messaging. Flash. Secure communications.
Sooner or later the services that make up the Internet today are going to fade into obscurity and be replaced by whatever comes next. However, it seems that ever since commercial interest came to the Internet, they have not been able to agree on one single standard. Is the future of the Internet going to be one perpetual standards war because everyone believes that a monopoly is the only way to do bussiness?
I believe very firmly that this has already hurt the Internet and it's developement. Why has there not been a single new standard service since the WWW? Why has the last ten years seen the least developement of new innovations on the Internet although more money has been spent on it then every before?
Of course, as always our hope lies in that the Open Source revolution can convince companies that terms like "proprietary" and "patented" are everything but marketing catch phrases, and that fostering freedom is the only way to be successful on the Internet. But as long as Steve Case is looked up to as the archetype Internet executive, I wouldn't hold my breath.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
And then there's the ones that are free
AFAIK mpeg is far from free. There are free licenses available to make players, but the codecs are still patented (look at the whole BladeEnc thing).
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Windows Quicktime + 32 bit colors = dog slow
That was probably your problem. Your conclusion is correct however.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Exactly who is the end user you are worrying about here? People with severe arthritis or carpal tunnel? People who use their feet to navigate their menus? Maybe if you were using a decent mouse instead of that iMac puck thing...
I have my 87 year old Grandmother using a windows box. She has trouble with a lot of things, but even she can place the mouse over the menus correctly.
Or, point by point:
Menubars are not placed at the top of the screen, making them harder to hit (remember, a menubar in the middle of the screen has finite dimensions, whereas a menubar at the top of the screen has infinite depth).
To start with there is a setting to get the menus up at the top (Mac style) in KDE. Of course, it sucks because it means you have to move the mouse a lot more to reach the menus, so no one in their right mind would use it.
The taskbar on the bottom of the screen has buttons that do not extend all the way to the edge of the screen, again denying them of a potential infinite depth and making them harder to hit.
Um, as I write this I have 16 windows on the taskbar. Thank god that they are all not crammed in on the bottom, or I wouldn't be able to see what a single one of them was doing.
In many window managers, nondestructive buttons such as Maximize are placed right next to destructive buttons such as Close, increasing the chances that the user will accidentally destroy a window.
Again, even my grandmother can hit these buttons, so can you. I promise.
To proceed from a menu to a submenu, it is necessary to manuever the mouse rightward with surgical precision through a single menu line in order to get to the submenu without accidentally tripping an adjacent menu item. Compare this design with the classic Macintosh menus, which provide a triangular "forgiveness zone" to make it easy to get to the submenu without closing it before you get there.
Umm, because you are a Mac user you think you have to hold the mouse down the whole time while using the menu, which you don't in Windows or in most window managers. Just click on the menu, and behold, it stays open. Move to the submenu (you can move the curser 16 laps around the screen on the way if that gets you going) and click on it. It will open too!
The Mac desktop is ANYTHING but ideal for todays computer usage. The position of the shortcuts (open the tiny little Apple menu) stinks, as does having to use a menu to change tasks, as does having to move the curser out of the window to get the menus. For anyone will to give them half a chance, the best of the Linux window managers are vastly superior in almost every way.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Sweden does have it's problems. Like any country that is faced with a fall in wealth (from the top to the bottom of the OECD in 25 years), and large social shifts from an extremely homogenus population to one of Europes most culturally diverse (of course, I believe this to be a good thing), we have our fair share of both segregation and bitterness.
However, the Swedish neo-Nazi threat is actually overhyped by a somewhat manic Swedish press and media. Most Swedes are very open by nature, and unlike many other European countries (Denmark, Austria, Italy) there is no extreme right party even close to reaching the parlament here. Even whispering something xenophobic in public is political suicide among the vast majority here, something which is obviously far from the case in a lot of other places.
If anything, our problem is not the widespread adoption of hatred, but inability of our legal system to do deal with criminal elements that gravitate toward this sort of behaviour in any country. The number of neo-Nazis in Sweden is probably no more than in the hundreds, and they are almost all criminal to begin with and would be in prison on other charges if the Swedish police and courts were even remotely doing their jobs.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
If I woke up as CmdrTaco and found this news I would post it too before having seen that it was already posted during the night. Its an emotional issue, probably the most important one ever to have the Linux and Slashdot communities at the center. This fight is about our right to be who we are, and persecution 16 year old - for no other reason then that he and his friends were smarter than a multi-billion dollar industry - must never be forgotten.
The article from Norwegian CNN looks like the same one that was linked from the last thread from Norwegian newspaper VG. Someone posted a translation here. It is a pretty good article, and includes Jon correction that DeCSS is not "a crack that allows copying of DVDs", but "a crack that allows _playing_ of DVDs". We have to continue to spread that message whenever we talk the press. This is not, and was never, about piracy.
This does mean war people, and it is just the beginning. The Information society _cannot_ both preserve the flows of information and enforce the appropriation of it, and as long as industry and government continues to kling to this contradiction, the costs to freedom will be without limit. As of yet, these are only a few paranoid associations who have not yet been actually threatened to the life: and yet they are ready to take it to the level of abusing the rights of a 16 year old. When the shit truly hits the fan, everything we love here stands to be lost.
I'm very afraid that when the overhyped overpriced Internet companies of today cannot live up to the growth and revenue they have promised, we will become the scapegoats. If your information company is loosing money, blame piracy and try to get the punishments lifted. If your Internet company is loosing money, blame cacheing, deep linking, and the use of Agents until it becomes illegal to link to a page on the WWW without permission (a violation of the very idea behind the media, not to speak of Freedom). If your tech company isn't making money, try to increase the already outdated patent laws beyond any possible rhyme and reason.
Can they win? Of course not. The genie is out of the bottle, and now that we have had glimpse of Freedom, we will never be giving up. The question is how much damage they can do to the world on the way down, and the answer is frightening.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm wondering whether the DVD-CA isn't holding its own members behind the light on this point as well as us. Most Movie exececutives are not likely to be technical, and believed the DVD consortsium's lie that CCS would help against copying (NOTHING helps against bit by bit copying).
Now DeCSS comes along, which doesn't change the situation on making pirate copies of DVDs, but does make it possible for anybody to build a player without the need for the DVD-CA. Should DeCSS become excepted, the DVD-CA would be out of a job. This is also the reason why they are attacking it legally. They know that whatever the do to poor Jon is not going to keep DeCSS out of the hands of pirates, but it will keep the css-auth code and keys underground, so anybody wanting to make a legal player will have to continue going to the DVD-CA.
The movie companies, stupid and scared shitless of piracy as they are, are falling for that this is actually in their interest, when it helps them very little. In many ways they are the most decieved of all...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Sorry, but you cannot whine about having a standard time that requires a minute understanding of the way timezones and daylight savings work (do you really want to go through life not understanding something so simple?) and get away with your intellectual dignity.
If you want to complain about something, complain about why we have Daylight Savings time to begin with. When was last time you needed to milk the cow in the morning? I would sure as hell rather be without it, and I'm on the eightieth parallel.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Wow, that was not very intelligent. Here's a hint:
Not everyone changes to daylight savings at the same time.
Europe does it at a different time then America, for example. Some places don't change at all (the Sun times don't vary much in Kenya). And (by golly!) in the Southern Hemisphere they actually set the clock forward during our winter months!
It's not to difficult to remember either: the cows need milking earlier in the summer, so you set the watch forward. That makes you one hour closer to GMT (but it makes me one hour further away! OMG!)
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Umm, did you read the first paragraph? I believe that we can't save ourselves by ignorance, and that we should always look to new ways to solve the new problems created by technology. If it turns out that technology lets gets us to the point where we erradicate ourselves, then so be it. I'm 100% in support of Nano-tech, nuclear research, cloning, bio-engineering, and anything else that we can think of.
But I wasn't arguing my opinion, just making an observation...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm not someone who advocates trying to resist the progress of technology, I believe we have to embrace it and change our lives accordingly, but its interesting that Nano-technology research is not more controversial considering the possible dangers involved.
The "dangers" involved in debated and even banned areas such as human cloning, bio engineering, and true AI are really pretty small compared with Nanotech, where one invisibly small nanomachine, programmed to multiply and destroy its host could eradicate life on earth and still not stop. Does Clinton want to be known for having started a second Manhattan project (I suppose it is a lot better than what he will most likely be known for)?
And the prospect of Nanotech has some _very_ interesting implications on the current RIAA, MPAA, and other "evil forces of the world" situation with the freedom of Information. When nanotech comes along, will we have a Copyright Act that forbids programming nanomachines to work-around "nano-scan protection systems"? Will Ford sue me for writing a Nano-assembler that can make a copy of your neighbors Mustang? Will Coca-Cola go after me for having bought one bottle and then copied it to all my friends at the party? And most importantly, if its true as the Copyright defenders say, that copy protection is necessary for the economy to work, will society then end with Nanotech? Maybe all the companies that produce physcial items ought to be out lobbying congress to not spend another cent on Nano-research, which could cripple their bussiness!!!
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Umm, people on parole are normally not allowed to leave their city without asking for permission. Obviously they have to stay in their country...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
4Front have had drivers for Vortex in OpenSound for the last half a year, and they worked quite well for the week one is allowed to test them. The OpenSound package + Aureal drivers costed $30 however, so you might as well have bought a Soundblaster PCI 128 (yes, the Aureals are better, but the OpenSound drivers don't have any of the features anyways).
Now Aureal have finally come through and released real drivers for the kernel (better late then never, but still to late to be easily forgiveable). According the the email they sent me about this (I have been hounding them about the lack of Linux drivers for a while) they will go on to OpenSource the drivers as well (I think the page says as much).
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The first article in this "series" contained a very enlightened post by someone (which was quickly moderated to the top) saying that the main reason Katz is flamed is because he preaches rather than takes part in the discussion, and that he never seems to notice the hundreds of insightful comments made after every one of his posts.
And, lo and behold, he has now gotten to the third installment of this pulpet marathon, and I have heard nothing from him about this. Katz doesn't even seem to acknowledge that although he loves to use himself and the Slashdot community as an example, he has never even made an effort (save one article about trying to install Linux) to be PART of the Slashdot community.
People do not flame because they are sexually understimulated or beat up in school or whatever theory I can't bring myself to care that Katz believes in, but they do so to get attention. If you behave like a higher power, never talking to, but rather at, others, of course you will flamed because you show that that is what is necessary to get your attention.
I have posted several hundred comments to this forum, and probably gotten as many replies and moderator points (for better or worse). Yet I cannot bring myself to recall EVER being flamed here. Not once. The only people who I see getting flamed here are the really dominant seminal posters like Signal11, but even then it is rather mild.
What makes you think, Jon Katz, that the "women and old people" that you prejudicely assume break down when insulted, are going to come into a community and start preaching at it from above, rather than starting by lurking, and then posting "from below" so to speak, as ten years of practice in netiquette have taught me is the right technique? Maybe you should look at yourself to see where the flaming problem begins, and not follow the philosophy of always blaming others so entrenched in the world about which you love to preach...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
- revenue = employed consultants * hours * fee
In the Wallstreet bull market, many companies that are grotesquely over valued (and yes, that does include two Linux companies) often have their market caps defended by the fact that they could see "network effects" or "explosive growth". For Linuxcare to end up being valued as highly as Redhat and VA are today however, there would have to be the expectation that soon they would have more Linux consultants onboard then their are Linux users today (ok, not quite, but still). Consultant companies see neither network effects or value increases of their holdings and products, all they can do to make more money is hire more employees. I think that is worth considering when investing in this company.-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No your missing the point. Anytime you are trying to rule over others, you are loosing your benevolence in somebody's eyes. You happen to think that people should get to do whatever they want "unless they are hurting other people" but not everyone agrees with that and might find you a terrible despot once in power. In fairness "hurting other people" is very vague as well. Is hitting somebody hurting people? Stealing stuff? Sleeping with somebody's wife? Pirate copying Windows 98?
It's not like Bill Gates is out there killing people or something, he just wants to put a computer in every house in every desk or whatever, which isn't very evil as far as visions go. He believes he has the right to act out of protection when Microsoft is threatened because the bigger and more dominant Microsoft becomes, the better the world will be.
Missing the point is thinking that there is, or could ever be, such a thing as a benevolent despot.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Whether a despot is benevolent or not is in the eye of the beholder. Contrary to what a lot of people in the world like to think, there are no absolute morals to decide this type of thing.
I have often argued that I think Bill Gates does believe himself to be a benevolent despot. He thinks he is doing the world a favour by taking power for himself, and that is why the whole antitrust trial frustrated him so much. In his own mind, he does have good intentions, and doesn't appply force when he doesn't have to. That you and I don't happen to agree (because on the whole we don't agree with his goals or methods) doesn't really change that.
Because people are different and freedom is fragile, infringing on our basic freedoms is bad even if the intentions are good.
If Linus is a benevolent despot, then he is a despot of a country with no borders, no laws, no police, and no currency. Except for occasional events, the only thing Despot Linus actually involves himself in is the national infrastructure, and even in that he works together with the populous ("so you built a bridge hu? Lets see if we cannot run a highway by it"). The royal roads are tollfree, kept clean by volunteers, and everyone is expected to take responsibility for themselves (well, not all, there are of course bus and train companies like "VA" and "Redhat"). Today he offered a decree that we try not to spoil the national name.
He, maybe I got a little carried of on that metaphor...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I think the aboive statement does put you in the "traitor to his species" category...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I usually agree completely with everything that BS writes (and I was pleased to see that his first paragraph validated my Slashdot post in the nCipher string), I do think that he is being a little hypocritical about this subject. While the whole nCipher thing was obviously just "hacksationalism", it seems to me that the dividing line between cases where he is and isn't OK with publishing cracks depends competely on where party is making money or not.
Ethics to the side, and as much as we all love being closet-Socialists here, capitalism is what makes our world go round. I wish all research could be funded for altruistic reasons, but in the real world the lure of profit IS often necessary. This is why we stand the fact that medical patents often keep poor people from being able to afford treatment, its for the greater good of having the medicines developed at all.
It might not be perfect to have companies researching for security holes so they can validate the sales of there products, but at least the holes are being found and published, which, IMHO, is a hell of lot better then letting them linger until somebody who would rather use them than publish them finds them. Use Open Source and you can be sure you can patch around before the hackers hit you when the problem hits the press.
I also see no mention in the article about BS own new Internet security company, Counterpane Internet Security, and how he plans to change his behaviour now (though he points fingers at LOFT for doing the same). He might have discussed this before though.
If anything, I think one of the biggest faulty parties here is Slashdot. A lot of journalists read this site, so when the editors post a story like the nCipher one, it does a great deal to spread it further. May I recommend that the
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
- No traditional corporate executive in America was smart enough then to harness the Internet. Anyone already running a profitable company would be mad to risk the whole thing on an unknown that might cost hundreds of millions of dollars before turning a profit. And if the executive wanted to, he likely would have been fired by the stockholders, management team or board of directors.
Actually that is not quite true, one did. As much as we all love to hate him and his company, he has to be given credit for that.I think that as much as it shows the inability of Bill Gates as and innovator that he was among the last to spot the Internet even from his chair, it shows his brilliance as a bussiness man that he dared turn his company around on a dime. If Time-Warner had had that, they would not have known the fate of Mirabilis, Nullsoft and Netscape today...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.