The combo instrument business (instruments, amps, etc. for your typical garage band) is the largest snakeoil business in the world. Out-of-this-world inventions show up here all the time, and every rockstar wannabe will save up money from his lawn-mowing job to buy whatever latest piece of crap is marketed to make him think he can be the next Eddie VanHalen.
Wrong, the biggest snakeoil business is the golf business. Both are dirty, though - one takes advantage of dumb teenagers, the other takes advantage of insecure middle managers.
Solid state has its own character. The Roland JC-120 is a good example. Also, highly processed guitars can do some neat shit.
One thing I've noticed about the current 'wave' of musicians is that they seem to respect progress. They don't say "tubes only, dude" or "all effects all the time". They know when to use effects and when not to.
Line 6, a digital music gear company, has used RJ-45 connectors and cat5 cable for a while now on their modeling amps and processors. Usually they connect a controller to a master unit; my POD can have a pedalboard connected via a standard ethernet cable, as long as it's not a crossover.
RJ45 is great for small apps like this. The jacks can be TINY and allow for all kinds of miniaturization. In the past you needed huge MIDI "cannon" jack or a >1 inch deep 1/4" jack.
I think this thing will compete more with S/PDIF than anything else.
Recording to PC sucks. The consumer applications of this will probably be throttled anyway (knowing Gibson, an old company that believes in tiered products) so you won't get nearly what a pro gets.
Ever noticed this? The GPL is hypocritical in terms because RMS doesn't want to give up HIS right for his code to be free! That asshole should be prepared to lose a little bit of his rights if he wants us all to give up ours, but academia doesn't do well in applying the same standards to itself.
Now, realistically speaking, after a few years only the most rabid control freaks continue to care about how their old code is used, so it's really all a moot point anyway except in the short term (1-5 years). Who wants 5 year old code bad enough to infringe a copyright to use it? By then whatever technique it used that makes it so special is probably common knowledge; if it's a device driver then better hardware probably exists. In the rare cases where the 5 year old code is the best solution, then why would the programmer/corp care? 5 years is the lifetime of 3 product lines in the tech business.
Thus, I think this whole thing is just a colossal waste of energy. Either give it away or don't, and stop trying to nitpick the world to pieces, life's too short for that shit.
it's impossible to prove that the authors of Unreal had set out to clone the technique of 3d rendering. All you can prove is that they wanted the same thing.
What about the concept of the automobile? each individual car is patented, but "vehicle with four wheels, auto-mobile" isn't.
If I'm a criminal, well, I've got guns, and ultimately those will secure more freedom than any laws. When they start trying to take guns away, you better start pouring concrete and digging holes, because that's when the real fighting will start.
I hate to sound so reactionary, but I believe it's only a matter of time, especially with Ashcroft in power. So why protest weak laws and go to prison when I can pretend to be a good little sheep and then come out swinging when it's time? At least if I die then, it will be for a real cause, instead of massive rectal hemmhorage from being somebody's bitch.
Believe it or not, I thought of that, but it seemed like such an asinine idea that it wasn't worth typing.
It would never hold up in court. The MS/Apple interface lawsuit comes to mind. You have to be able to patent a technique for creating the environment, not just the environment itself.
And if it did, who the fuck cares? It'll just get circumvented by the underground anyway.
Re:O'Reilley : RMS :: Libertarianism : Socialism
on
Freedom or Power Redux
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In a few short posts, we've created a conversation that encompasses democracy, socialism, communism, capitalism, and copyright and patent law. I'm not going to even attempt to tie all of this together.
It's ok, I will.
Democracy is a pipe dream, just like communism and socialism. Communism is an ideal where all goods and services produced in an economy are communal, or shared; democracy intends to share the responsibility of governing a nation but most people just don't want it or are too stupid to be trusted with it. Socialism is more of a philosophy of the government taking care of its people and due to far-right rhetoric in the USA, has become synonymous with communism in our vernacular and doesn't apply here.
Capitalism begets copyright and patent law, to ensure that ideas are worth as much as finished product. In a communist state, nobody's work would need any protection because all work is for everyone, not just the guy that made it.
Limiting the duration of copyrights for software is a wise move. The ideas in a book or piece of music are worth something 40 years later - software isn't.
In a different slashdot discussion, someone made a comparison between math theorems and software.
That was me, hello there. I've got no problem with people wanting to give their work away. I've got a problem with people being FORCED to give their work away, which is what the GPL says - if one piece of this software is touched by the GPL, it's all touched by the GPL and must be free. It's like the brown acid of licenses, you take it once and you're screwed.
I don't like patents for games at all; that would prevent clones, and clones are how that industry stays strong and vibrant. If Quake could get a patent on a crucial piece of the engine, there'd be no Half-life or Unreal.
Wrong. Half-Life's engine is a licensed and modified Quake II engine. Unreal's engine is a built-from-scratch engine. Licensing the engine makes patent infringement a moot point; building your own engine doesn't do anything that Id could patent in the first place.
you don't get it. he's comfortable where he is. he doesn't want to spend days/weeks learning all new stuff for ideological purposes.
it's an OS, not a fsckin' religion, and until you linux people figure that out, it's going to be a joke to everyone but broke college students who still think Marxism works.
[TO THE MODERATOR: yeah that's right, -1 troll and -1 flamebait, you bigoted sons of bitches]
"right" is a wholly subjective term. You want to argue that I'm just saying my opinions are truth, then I can say the same thing.
Every company I've worked for considered a program to be a PRODUCT. That's why programmers create products, not because of some inherent philosophical alignment with production vs. thought, it's because the world deems what they create to be product, and not art. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whatever gets you paid so that you can survive outside of your corporate master's domain. All this talk about 'art' means nothing when you're talking about the survival of a company, that 100s/1000s/10,000s/etc. people draw their livelihood from, or that your rent is paid, or making sure your kids eat, or your elderly mother has her medicine, or whatever your responsibilities are.
I'm a self-taught programmer. I didn't have the benefit of the good parts of CS training (like theory and modeling and such), or the curse of the bad parts of it like all this holier-than-thou shit about code being 'art' and the study of classical logic and calculus being the only way to get things done. You can learn the theory on your own, but it takes a long time to unlearn the rhetoric. One of these days all the shit will flush from your brain and you'll realize I'm right:)
No, we're both craftsmen. His ego and his blind hero worship of RMS and other programmers just won't let him admit it.
Of course taking a shit isn't a 'craft'. That was an example of how english is a totally non-definite language where any word can be applied to anything and there's an argument for each and every application.
You're obviously not out of college yet. Once you get in the real world, you will understand completely what I'm talking about.. until then, for your sake, I'd advise you to stop making a naive ass of yourself.
And let me put it this way: If you've never been moved by a beautiful piece of code, you're no programmer.
I guess I'm no programmer then:) To me beauty is a concept that doesn't extend to code. Code just IS - sometime's it's poorly done, sometime's it's well-done, but jesus christ, it's not the equivalent of the Sistine Chapel...
Obviously, you don't live out in the real world, or you'd never argue against being selfish and caring about anyone except one's self. To do anything different outside of a dorm room or mom/dad's house is to be a moron. The world just doesn't work that way, because people are inherently bad and will take everything from you if you give them the slightest opening.
You're using the noun-adverb form (can't remember the proper term for that) of 'art' there, which is basically the same thing as craft. Art as a concept (i.e. as a strict noun) is what I said it was.
Take two painters. One paints pictures on canvas. One paints the walls of houses. Both engage in the art of painting. But which one is creating art, and which one performs a craft?
For that matter, I could talk about being a master of the art of defecation, and be grammatically and etymologically correct, but nobody's going to call that a work of art:)
English is a fsck'ed up language and that's why we can even argue about this - too many synonyms.
Does your boss know you feel this way? I'll take 'craft', but not 'art'. A work of art is a work of man created to induce or display emotion.
The product of a craft is that of a highly skilled individual who may take a creative approach to solving or creating the product, but it does not express anything more than its utility.
Let me put it this way: If you've ever cried looking at code, you need professional help, or you need to get out and see some REAL art.
So the question is, should government be in the business of creating capital markets for software?
I'm a programmer. I only code for money or, RARELY, as in once a year, for my own personal enjoyment. As such, I don't care how the market is created as long as it exists and I can be a part of it. Do an informal poll and I think you'll find most programmers (that are working, not that are in school and thus obsessed with idealistic shit like GNU and the FSF) feel similarly. At least, every programmer I've ever met did.
I worked with a guy (nameless in public) who was once on a project with RMS. My former co-worker said RMS was lazy and couldn't code for shit (this was just his opinion, but this guy has a PhD in comp sci and has worked for Sun, Cray, and other big-ticket companies and is the most accomplished programmer that I know), except when he went home and worked on what he wanted to work on. Maybe RMS wants the world to make their software free so that he can get quick cash without worrying about being sloppy?
I know if I could just download the answer to all my projects I'd spend about half the time on them, but I'd feel pretty dirty. But, lots of people wouldn't, look at the popularity of Java. I hear there used to be such a thing as professional integrity.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong, the biggest snakeoil business is the golf business. Both are dirty, though - one takes advantage of dumb teenagers, the other takes advantage of insecure middle managers.
Solid state has its own character. The Roland JC-120 is a good example. Also, highly processed guitars can do some neat shit.
One thing I've noticed about the current 'wave' of musicians is that they seem to respect progress. They don't say "tubes only, dude" or "all effects all the time". They know when to use effects and when not to.
My Schecter beats everyone's guitar :) best guitars made, if only they weren't made in Korea.
of course, the USA strat that's waiting on me at the Fedex dispatch might trump that, but as of right now, Schecter 0wnz j00... muhuahhahaha
It's nothing new anyway.
Line 6, a digital music gear company, has used RJ-45 connectors and cat5 cable for a while now on their modeling amps and processors. Usually they connect a controller to a master unit; my POD can have a pedalboard connected via a standard ethernet cable, as long as it's not a crossover.
RJ45 is great for small apps like this. The jacks can be TINY and allow for all kinds of miniaturization. In the past you needed huge MIDI "cannon" jack or a >1 inch deep 1/4" jack.
I think this thing will compete more with S/PDIF than anything else.
Recording to PC sucks. The consumer applications of this will probably be throttled anyway (knowing Gibson, an old company that believes in tiered products) so you won't get nearly what a pro gets.
That's the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. Buy a real computer and get with the frickin' program.
to which I say: who's the author of cp? How about file? where are they saying that nobody can distribute the code in the utils packages?
Ever noticed this? The GPL is hypocritical in terms because RMS doesn't want to give up HIS right for his code to be free! That asshole should be prepared to lose a little bit of his rights if he wants us all to give up ours, but academia doesn't do well in applying the same standards to itself.
Now, realistically speaking, after a few years only the most rabid control freaks continue to care about how their old code is used, so it's really all a moot point anyway except in the short term (1-5 years). Who wants 5 year old code bad enough to infringe a copyright to use it? By then whatever technique it used that makes it so special is probably common knowledge; if it's a device driver then better hardware probably exists. In the rare cases where the 5 year old code is the best solution, then why would the programmer/corp care? 5 years is the lifetime of 3 product lines in the tech business.
Thus, I think this whole thing is just a colossal waste of energy. Either give it away or don't, and stop trying to nitpick the world to pieces, life's too short for that shit.
it's impossible to prove that the authors of Unreal had set out to clone the technique of 3d rendering. All you can prove is that they wanted the same thing.
What about the concept of the automobile? each individual car is patented, but "vehicle with four wheels, auto-mobile" isn't.
FLASH! Murderer apprehended!
Dr. DOS confesses after being driven mad by laughing penguin!
In his first statement since capture Dr. DOS further said that the Devil made him do it.
If I'm a criminal, well, I've got guns, and ultimately those will secure more freedom than any laws. When they start trying to take guns away, you better start pouring concrete and digging holes, because that's when the real fighting will start.
I hate to sound so reactionary, but I believe it's only a matter of time, especially with Ashcroft in power. So why protest weak laws and go to prison when I can pretend to be a good little sheep and then come out swinging when it's time? At least if I die then, it will be for a real cause, instead of massive rectal hemmhorage from being somebody's bitch.
Believe it or not, I thought of that, but it seemed like such an asinine idea that it wasn't worth typing.
It would never hold up in court. The MS/Apple interface lawsuit comes to mind. You have to be able to patent a technique for creating the environment, not just the environment itself.
And if it did, who the fuck cares? It'll just get circumvented by the underground anyway.
In a few short posts, we've created a conversation that encompasses democracy, socialism, communism, capitalism, and copyright and patent law. I'm not going to even attempt to tie all of this together.
It's ok, I will.
Democracy is a pipe dream, just like communism and socialism. Communism is an ideal where all goods and services produced in an economy are communal, or shared; democracy intends to share the responsibility of governing a nation but most people just don't want it or are too stupid to be trusted with it. Socialism is more of a philosophy of the government taking care of its people and due to far-right rhetoric in the USA, has become synonymous with communism in our vernacular and doesn't apply here.
Capitalism begets copyright and patent law, to ensure that ideas are worth as much as finished product. In a communist state, nobody's work would need any protection because all work is for everyone, not just the guy that made it.
Limiting the duration of copyrights for software is a wise move. The ideas in a book or piece of music are worth something 40 years later - software isn't.
In a different slashdot discussion, someone made a comparison between math theorems and software.
That was me, hello there. I've got no problem with people wanting to give their work away. I've got a problem with people being FORCED to give their work away, which is what the GPL says - if one piece of this software is touched by the GPL, it's all touched by the GPL and must be free. It's like the brown acid of licenses, you take it once and you're screwed.
I don't like patents for games at all; that would prevent clones, and clones are how that industry stays strong and vibrant. If Quake could get a patent on a crucial piece of the engine, there'd be no Half-life or Unreal.
Wrong. Half-Life's engine is a licensed and modified Quake II engine. Unreal's engine is a built-from-scratch engine. Licensing the engine makes patent infringement a moot point; building your own engine doesn't do anything that Id could patent in the first place.
of course they're out to get me. I let them try to build up proof. I'm just waiting on the civil war to start, like I said - corps vs. the people.
MSDN is niiice. All this free MS software. There's an MSDN version of XP, too, FYI.
(I bought XP so I could have a voice when the class-action lawsuit comes and the civil war breaks out)
you don't get it. he's comfortable where he is. he doesn't want to spend days/weeks learning all new stuff for ideological purposes.
it's an OS, not a fsckin' religion, and until you linux people figure that out, it's going to be a joke to everyone but broke college students who still think Marxism works.
[TO THE MODERATOR: yeah that's right, -1 troll and -1 flamebait, you bigoted sons of bitches]
"right" is a wholly subjective term. You want to argue that I'm just saying my opinions are truth, then I can say the same thing.
:)
Every company I've worked for considered a program to be a PRODUCT. That's why programmers create products, not because of some inherent philosophical alignment with production vs. thought, it's because the world deems what they create to be product, and not art. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whatever gets you paid so that you can survive outside of your corporate master's domain. All this talk about 'art' means nothing when you're talking about the survival of a company, that 100s/1000s/10,000s/etc. people draw their livelihood from, or that your rent is paid, or making sure your kids eat, or your elderly mother has her medicine, or whatever your responsibilities are.
I'm a self-taught programmer. I didn't have the benefit of the good parts of CS training (like theory and modeling and such), or the curse of the bad parts of it like all this holier-than-thou shit about code being 'art' and the study of classical logic and calculus being the only way to get things done. You can learn the theory on your own, but it takes a long time to unlearn the rhetoric. One of these days all the shit will flush from your brain and you'll realize I'm right
No, we're both craftsmen. His ego and his blind hero worship of RMS and other programmers just won't let him admit it.
Of course taking a shit isn't a 'craft'. That was an example of how english is a totally non-definite language where any word can be applied to anything and there's an argument for each and every application.
You're obviously not out of college yet. Once you get in the real world, you will understand completely what I'm talking about.. until then, for your sake, I'd advise you to stop making a naive ass of yourself.
And let me put it this way: If you've never been moved by a beautiful piece of code, you're no programmer.
:) To me beauty is a concept that doesn't extend to code. Code just IS - sometime's it's poorly done, sometime's it's well-done, but jesus christ, it's not the equivalent of the Sistine Chapel...
I guess I'm no programmer then
Oh shit, I'm letting myself be trolled...
Obviously, you don't live out in the real world, or you'd never argue against being selfish and caring about anyone except one's self. To do anything different outside of a dorm room or mom/dad's house is to be a moron. The world just doesn't work that way, because people are inherently bad and will take everything from you if you give them the slightest opening.
You're using the noun-adverb form (can't remember the proper term for that) of 'art' there, which is basically the same thing as craft. Art as a concept (i.e. as a strict noun) is what I said it was.
:)
Take two painters. One paints pictures on canvas. One paints the walls of houses. Both engage in the art of painting. But which one is creating art, and which one performs a craft?
For that matter, I could talk about being a master of the art of defecation, and be grammatically and etymologically correct, but nobody's going to call that a work of art
English is a fsck'ed up language and that's why we can even argue about this - too many synonyms.
Does your boss know you feel this way? I'll take 'craft', but not 'art'. A work of art is a work of man created to induce or display emotion.
The product of a craft is that of a highly skilled individual who may take a creative approach to solving or creating the product, but it does not express anything more than its utility.
Let me put it this way: If you've ever cried looking at code, you need professional help, or you need to get out and see some REAL art.
So the question is, should government be in the business of creating capital markets for software?
I'm a programmer. I only code for money or, RARELY, as in once a year, for my own personal enjoyment. As such, I don't care how the market is created as long as it exists and I can be a part of it. Do an informal poll and I think you'll find most programmers (that are working, not that are in school and thus obsessed with idealistic shit like GNU and the FSF) feel similarly. At least, every programmer I've ever met did.
I worked with a guy (nameless in public) who was once on a project with RMS. My former co-worker said RMS was lazy and couldn't code for shit (this was just his opinion, but this guy has a PhD in comp sci and has worked for Sun, Cray, and other big-ticket companies and is the most accomplished programmer that I know), except when he went home and worked on what he wanted to work on. Maybe RMS wants the world to make their software free so that he can get quick cash without worrying about being sloppy?
I know if I could just download the answer to all my projects I'd spend about half the time on them, but I'd feel pretty dirty. But, lots of people wouldn't, look at the popularity of Java. I hear there used to be such a thing as professional integrity.