It's $99 a year IIRC which is $99 a year more than on the Openmoko stuff like the FreeRunner. So in just two years, you'd have paid of the price difference of the iPhone subsidy.
You can dev officially (without being a large corporation, I know a couple of basement hackers that do) for Xbox with Xna; that's not free software, either, but no-one's saying it is. It's as bad as Apple but it doesn't have nearly as many apologists and "evangelists" pushing its kool-aid.
Old people often have failing memories and need tools that remind them of specifics. One thing they would need above all out of a machine like this (if they can get over the shock of the idea of looking to a machine for this kind of help anyway) would be intelligent prompting, with specific words or items that they are likely to have forgotten.
Is it because would be intelligent prompting with specific words or items that they are likely to have forgotten that you came to me?
I agree the description makes this robot sound like an expensive 'Eliza'. If reflecting and being vague rather than specific prompting is really what it will do, then it's going to be specially useless to the elderly.
Are you trying to say that if there was no copyright, then all software would be free?
Ok, let's tackle the "no copyright" example first:
There would be no legal basis for asking people to share their innovations back to the community.
Similar to how the *BSDs work today.
You could take code, modify it, improve it, and then sell binary versions without releasing your improvements.
And reverse-engineering it would be legal, and what's the point of keeping the source secret (and thus losing all the benifits of bazaar models etc), if it's only to be reverse-engineered?
You wouldn't be required to acknowledge the original author
I think it's a shame that "acknowledge authorship" is lumped in with "copying" and "modifying" in the same law, since it's not directly related. Falsifying authorship is fraud, copying or modifying software isn't.
and you could put the code into commercial projects whether the original author liked it or not.
Free software today can be used for commercial projects. There's really no difference.
we would have to rely entirely on people's goodwill and charitable impulses
But with copyright, we have to rely on people not using copyright in a non-copyleft way. E.g, with copyright Microsoft can prohibit others from distributing and modifying Microsoft Windows.
All right, so the above tackles the "no copyright" scenario, which I believe still would work, even though you don't.
Now how about thinking outside the box a little? Instead of copyright, there could be laws mandating availability of source.
Or we could have any other law we wanted, something that benefited everyone. Laws are written by living humans, not dead queens. (And software wasn't really copyrightable until the US joined up with the Berne convention in the seventies.)
I'm tired of hearing the "we need to keep copyright exactly like it is since free software depend on it" myth. RMS would die just for the sake of turning over in his grave, if he heard it.
It's a big difference between what you're doing, and other things being done in the name of the "war on drugs", like what the US is doing in South America.
That's true, but I still wish that someone could come up with a less harmful/disruptive way to promote progress in the medical field than patents.
It's a big difference between saying "you can't be cured because no drug exists" and "you can't be cured because our current economic system encourages and allows exclusive rights on this drug". (Even though that economic system made the drug possible in the first place. I'm grateful that it saved some lives, I can still think it sucks that it's kept out of reach from others.)
Capitalism and IP-rights feel like a surreal "game" to me, that would be unnecessary if only humanity could get its act together. Failing that, it could come up a better "game" (protocol for property and service transactions).
Hey you said it yourself - you liked Inkscape's GUI over Sodipodi right?
From what I've seen of Inkscape, yeah, I think it seems a bit better. Not because of the MDI issue, it's a couple of small details I like (and big ones, such as layer support). I haven't switched from Sodipodi yet.
I'm of the "every OS sucks" school of thought. I'm used to Debian, and thus a bit "blind to its faults" so that's what I use. I can see how Mac/Windows users can become similarly blind to their OS' faults, or at least used to them.
Feel free to keep reading my (swedish-language) blog, that's what it's there for. don't know ho you are (you're posting as anonymous) so I can't check out your website.
I know, the free tools do need improvement (but they are constantly improving).
So does the major non-free programs - I don't feel a bit comfortable with Photoshop. (I use Gimp's Script-Fu, and Sodipodi's XML-editor, and other weird geek features.)
It's partly a matter of which tool you're used to, and I'm used to the Gimp and Sodipodi (aggravated with the Inkscape fork, and hope one of them can catch up with the other soon - it's annoying that they both have disadvantages over each other. Inkscape has the better UI).
(On a more one-on-one note: Intressant blog du har =P)
One-on-one reply: Thanks! (Unless you're sarcastic, but you weren't, right?) The design might be simple, but it's all done with free tools and without putting too much time into it.
All the money in the world doesn't buy you personal artistic talent. Leave it to someone who has it.
Or: practice, practice, practice. Maybe you won't be able to "paint a wooden spoon such that you can sense God", but you can become pretty good, with practice.
Funny you should mention Tigert, who does use the Gimp.
I know a lot of artists for free/open source software projects use non-free programs like AI or 3DS, but not all.
Different people are used to different tools, and I primarily use Sodipodi, with a couple of extra programs on the side (most notably the Gimp).
Wait 5-10 years before using the free art tools? That's crazy talk. They're usable enough to do great art now. (You know that Susan Kare, one of my favourite artists, did a lot of her most beautiful work using only MacPaint or Windows Paintbrush?)
I tried to avoid talking about what I thought was fair or not; but I will say that I consider "counterfait", or brand fraud, something very different from regular copying. Saying "this release is endorsed by (say) Mariah Carey" is different from saying "here's a cheap disc with tunes by Mariah Carey".
The prices are not a supply problem so much as the monopoly issue.
The monopoly issue leads to the supply problem which leads to the prices.
I do, actually (I've read GEB a couple of times, but other than that, no). But most of the time I listen to the Brandenburg concerts, which don't have much singing AFAICH.
The stumbling block for A/UX was the same as the early releases of what came to be OSX: classic Mac/OS emulation.
I always thought that what killed A/UX off was that it wouldn't run on the powerpc.
It's a real shame Apple didn't join the fight over Lorraine (what became the Amiga).
On the one hand, the Amiga's message-passing microkernel architecture never failed to impress me, on the other hand, I thought they wanted to solve the problems of memory protection, a TCP/IP stack, and multiple users, which the Amiga (at the time) certainly didn't have.
Price is driven by demand, and the profit to the company is determined by the cost to them.
No. Price is driven by demand and supply, and the product duplication monopoly that copyright currently allows makes it easy for the corporations to artificially limit supply, thus having a larger degree of price control. Copyright is first and formost an anti-competitive measure.
Slashdot Mirror
Except WotC did save D&D... by coming up with the OGL license, which enabled the entire OSR/retroclone movement.
What's the global warming footprint on these things?
It's $99 a year IIRC which is $99 a year more than on the Openmoko stuff like the FreeRunner. So in just two years, you'd have paid of the price difference of the iPhone subsidy.
You can dev officially (without being a large corporation, I know a couple of basement hackers that do) for Xbox with Xna; that's not free software, either, but no-one's saying it is. It's as bad as Apple but it doesn't have nearly as many apologists and "evangelists" pushing its kool-aid.
The very day I finish a project on time for the first time in my life, I find out that the world is probably ending soon.
Is it because would be intelligent prompting with specific words or
items that they are likely to have forgotten that you came to me?
Why do you say that?
Ok, let's tackle the "no copyright" example first:
Similar to how the *BSDs work today.
And reverse-engineering it would be legal, and what's the point of keeping the source secret (and thus losing all the benifits of bazaar models etc), if it's only to be reverse-engineered?
I think it's a shame that "acknowledge authorship" is lumped in with "copying" and "modifying" in the same law, since it's not directly related. Falsifying authorship is fraud, copying or modifying software isn't.
Free software today can be used for commercial projects. There's really no difference.
But with copyright, we have to rely on people not using copyright in a non-copyleft way. E.g, with copyright Microsoft can prohibit others from distributing and modifying Microsoft Windows.
All right, so the above tackles the "no copyright" scenario, which I believe still would work, even though you don't.
Now how about thinking outside the box a little? Instead of copyright, there could be laws mandating availability of source.
Or we could have any other law we wanted, something that benefited everyone. Laws are written by living humans, not dead queens. (And software wasn't really copyrightable until the US joined up with the Berne convention in the seventies.)
I'm tired of hearing the "we need to keep copyright exactly like it is since free software depend on it" myth. RMS would die just for the sake of turning over in his grave, if he heard it.
It's a big difference between what you're doing, and other things being done in the name of the "war on drugs", like what the US is doing in South America.
Currently, yes.
But it's outright silly to say that without copyright, there would be no free software when it's the other way around.
That's true, but I still wish that someone could come up with a less harmful/disruptive way to promote progress in the medical field than patents.
It's a big difference between saying "you can't be cured because no drug exists" and "you can't be cured because our current economic system encourages and allows exclusive rights on this drug". (Even though that economic system made the drug possible in the first place. I'm grateful that it saved some lives, I can still think it sucks that it's kept out of reach from others.)
Capitalism and IP-rights feel like a surreal "game" to me, that would be unnecessary if only humanity could get its act together. Failing that, it could come up a better "game" (protocol for property and service transactions).
It's because java isn't free (open source) software that it has to be forked (with GCJ, Kaffe, et al).
A nice, DFSG-compliant, GPL-compatible license would make all of our lives easier and a fork wouldn't be necessary.
That sounds really expensive.
From what I've seen of Inkscape, yeah, I think it seems a bit better. Not because of the MDI issue, it's a couple of small details I like (and big ones, such as layer support). I haven't switched from Sodipodi yet.
I'm of the "every OS sucks" school of thought. I'm used to Debian, and thus a bit "blind to its faults" so that's what I use. I can see how Mac/Windows users can become similarly blind to their OS' faults, or at least used to them.
Feel free to keep reading my (swedish-language) blog, that's what it's there for. don't know ho you are (you're posting as anonymous) so I can't check out your website.
Right. I use Emacs artist-mode for ascii art, myself (and I love it!), but it's not only about the tools, it's about the effort and the vision.
So does the major non-free programs - I don't feel a bit comfortable with Photoshop. (I use Gimp's Script-Fu, and Sodipodi's XML-editor, and other weird geek features.)
It's partly a matter of which tool you're used to, and I'm used to the Gimp and Sodipodi (aggravated with the Inkscape fork, and hope one of them can catch up with the other soon - it's annoying that they both have disadvantages over each other. Inkscape has the better UI).
One-on-one reply: Thanks! (Unless you're sarcastic, but you weren't, right?) The design might be simple, but it's all done with free tools and without putting too much time into it.
Or: practice, practice, practice. Maybe you won't be able to "paint a wooden spoon such that you can sense God", but you can become pretty good, with practice.
Funny you should mention Tigert, who does use the Gimp.
I know a lot of artists for free/open source software projects use non-free programs like AI or 3DS, but not all.
Different people are used to different tools, and I primarily use Sodipodi, with a couple of extra programs on the side (most notably the Gimp).
Wait 5-10 years before using the free art tools? That's crazy talk. They're usable enough to do great art now. (You know that Susan Kare, one of my favourite artists, did a lot of her most beautiful work using only MacPaint or Windows Paintbrush?)
I don't think they allow free software programmers to release them under the GPL.
I do, actually (I've read GEB a couple of times, but other than that, no). But most of the time I listen to the Brandenburg concerts, which don't have much singing AFAICH.
I always thought that what killed A/UX off was that it wouldn't run on the powerpc.
On the one hand, the Amiga's message-passing microkernel architecture never failed to impress me, on the other hand, I thought they wanted to solve the problems of memory protection, a TCP/IP stack, and multiple users, which the Amiga (at the time) certainly didn't have.
No.
Price is driven by demand and supply, and the product duplication monopoly that copyright currently allows makes it easy for the corporations to artificially limit supply, thus having a larger degree of price control. Copyright is first and formost an anti-competitive measure.
"I hear playing, but I don't hear singing."
(IMHO, DRM hurts consumers.)
You're not the first to think that, unfortunately.