Jon, why do you insist on writing lengthy articles describing just exactly what we, the various groups in the "geek" community, are? It just sounds like sucking up. Wow, we're *smart*, we're *free thinkers*, we're *team players*, we're *independent*, we're *creative*, oh yeah, did I mention we're *free thinkers*, blah blah blah. Why are you telling this to us? I think "we" know who "we" are (or at least "they" know who "they" are). Do you also write long analytical articles about the character of choir boys, for the choir? If you are going to stereotype, and then fall over yourself flattering any given group of people, at least do so to *a different* group. Next article: Return Return Tab Tab Brace Left Brace Right - Programmers are *smart*, *independent*, *free thinking*, *creative* people!
1. Is it classified as? Animal
2. Can it be used in remote areas? Irrelevant
3. Is it a carnivore? Partly
4. Can it run fast? Doubtful
5. Is it a place? No
6. Can it scratch? Yes
7. Does it have whiskers? No
8. Does it live in the forest? No
9. Can it climb? Maybe
10. Does it perform? Yes
11. Is it multicolored? No
12. Is it helpful in the learning process? Yes
13. Is it worth a lot of money? Probably
14. Does it bite? Doubtful
15. Do you use it in public? Depends
16. Does it come from an animal? Yes
17. Would you find it in an office? Yes
18. Would you find it on a farm? Doubtful
19. Do you know any songs about it? No
20. I guess that it is a human? Yes
What the hell was that first babbling "content pirate" questioner about? What is a content pirate? Some lame person who copies other's web graphics or something??
So why haven't theme makers got it through their skull that while they can replicate the look and feel, they can't simply slap another company's trademarked logo on top of their work? Who does this? Come on? Stop it. It's dumb.
There is a whole lot more to look and feel than a few bitmaps of widgets and a color scheme. Apple is just a stingy spoilt brat. They'd sue mirrors for look and feel infringement.
I thought the RBL was a list that ISPs could *voluntarily* use to blacklist sites. So, if Iraq is brutal and violent, then the message is "stay away from this country, do not make any deals with them, etc.". If Napster is infringing on copyright wholesale, the message is "stay away from this service, do not let any of your copyrighted materials pass through it". If you are shooting people in your dorm, the message is "stay away from this dorm, it has a bloody psycho in it running around and killing people".
Are those *unreasonable* precautions that can be voluntarily followed by subscribers? Man, it almost sounds logical.
Um, isn't the RBL *voluntary*? So why the hell are we getting so worked up? If the ISP is mindlessly blocking valid sites on the RBL, then yell at them...or tell them to tell the RBL that those sites are OK.
However, Microsoft still has the patented Evil Secret Escape Pod of subscription-based software...so the minute we see their operating system prices come down (in fact they could even do this themselves on purpose), I expect we'll see most of the other software people are dependent on them for to switch to a subscription basis, and *blam*, they maintain their lock.
This is just the real world - as long as MS's standards are open and not proprietry I have no particular problem with it. In a way it's good that at this time, the birth of the Net, there is a behemoth who can dictate common standards. Without MS I fear the Net would degenerate into conflicting and incompatible rulesets.
Man, replace MS with Novell/DEC/Apple, and I'd think that this was written 20 years ago when networking was just starting. But where is IPX/SPX, AppleTalk, DECNet, etc. now?
Agreed, but...and this is why copyrights are not applied to ideas, but rather to expressions of ideas, such as text or code.
Ok, fine, patents then. They're supposed to be for processes or inventions, but in reality they are applied to ideas. E.g., DeCSS code is an entirely original expression (AFAIK) of an unoriginal idea, but the MPAA is fighting against the ability of others to use that idea (CSS). In reality copyright and patents provide protection for ideas, not just their physical implementations (e.g., a "process" is basically an idea...it doesn't really consist itself of anything physical).
Sorry bud, but you have no right to profit off their work, or to even use their work without their permission.
Who said profit? Who said work? I'm not claiming I have a right to profit off others' work (insofar as the germination of an idea is not quantifiable "work"). But I think that ideas are fundamentally different from physical objects or processes. They are inherently unownable. So yes, although we've been socialized to think of ideas as being "owned" by their creators, they are in fact, short of artifical intervention such as laws, owned by everyone the second they are exposed (the rationale being that no one really creates ideas in an absolute vacuum - they are created within a whole environment of other ideas; since we cannot possible quantify what or whose ideas have contributed to a new idea, we must resign ourselves to accepting that *everybody* has a fair share in the new idea). So, yes, I believe people have the natural "right" to use other's ideas once they are exposed. I thought this was the whole basis for progress. If Ogg patented the wheel, we'd be up a creek wouldn't we?
That's not to say that I have a right to their *code* (which they spent personal, quantifiable effort creating) or any physical product they produce with their idea.
I think we just need to realize that 100 amateur programmers writing and reviewing code, ad-hoc, is not necessarily better than 10 professional software engineers working closely together, using some semi-formal procedure for specification, requirements, collaberation, and coding.
A lot of the most successful open source projects, were originally created by professional programmers (Unix flavors, including BSD; Apache; Mozilla; GNU utilities in general), and still retain some form of regimentation. Linux would not be were it is if Linus et al. let every single developer add their patches in, or modify code, whenever they wanted. Unfortunately this is exactly what happens in many new open source projects under the banner of "freedom"...which ends up producing remarkably mediocre code.
Yes, but when I drive my car, do I *TALK* to it? No, I use appropriate controlling devices for the situation: a steering wheel and pedals. Yet my bicycle handles and pedals are very different. As are airplane controls. The point is, there is no one *perfect* interface. CLI is just wrong for some things. As is a particular type of GUI, etc.
It seems to me, hardware is engineered better (or just simply *more*), because the barrier to entry is high. You don't just create a graphics chip by typing at a keyboard. You need a logical design. Written/drawn down, entered through some circuit construction program. You need real physical materials. You need to undergo an expensive process to make those materials into a physical embodiment of your logic. If you screw up, well, back to the drawing board.
Software on the other hand has a very low barrier to entry. Got a compiler? Got an editor? Great. You're now a software "engineer"! Tappity tap. Hello world. Tappity tap. Hello enterprise. Tappity tap. Hello critical infrastructure. It is simply too easy to "just" fix this, or change that. What if every civil engineer decided that they would "just" tweak this or that parameter and see what happens? Or maybe they'd "just" fix the one faulty bolt. It doesn't happen (plus, a major advance of the industrial age was standardized building components, which software still has very little of). Software engineers, managers, and the industry, need to think of the bytes that make up their software as important as an actual constructed, engineered structure, that one shouldn't make whimsical changes or additions to without much consideration and peer review. Because literally, badly designed software ends up costing just as much, or more, than real physical structures.
Those buttons are the coolest things since sliced bread. Highlighting a word and hitting Google search, or hitting GoogleScout on a page to find related pages, is really useful. Guess you can tell I like Google.
It is much easier to build an economy when you have a basis of ownership. But even Jefferson realized, way back when, before computers or software, that ideas themselves are *unownable*. Repeat that to yourself. *unownable* Because ideas are the basis for the "new economy", the basis for software.
Now that we have established that ideas are unownable, let's just look at what the software industry is. When you go to a software store you pay maybe $50 for some box on a shelf. I'd wager that perhaps 2 to 8 dollars of that might actually be material value, transportation costs, advertising costs, etc. The rest of the money you are paying for an *artificial scarcity*, created by a bunch of people *hoarding ideas*. Wow, that sounds radical. But, if you go back to ideas as unownable, you can see software, as a product, really a result of a group of people who take some ideas, generate some ideas, and then gather in a circle and hoard those ideas. This isn't necessarily Evil. We realize that we have to incentivize people to create stuff, in the face of unownable ideas. The way we do this is with copyright and patents. Now the core of the whole problem is that copyright and patents last *way too long* in the software industry. 75 years is outrages even for a material work (e.g. a book), let alone a piece of software. Chances are, you will *die* before your copyright on piece of text expires. That is just silly. That is stepping far over the bounds of simple incentive. And software gets obsoleted even faster. A year, maybe two or three. I'd say copyright should last maybe five years on software, maybe push it to ten. Do *you* buy any software that is older than ten years? What possible profit motive, other than plain stinginess, the opportunity to screw over that poor old soul with the legacy system, could people have for software this old?
We are allowing people to create kingdoms and empires upon artificial ownership of ideas. So there are a few robin hoods around. It just galls me that software companies, or other types of "media" companies, think that they have an inherent *right* to profit. Imagine a brand new technology is invented tomorrow, by which a material, once it is created, is instantly duplicated just by the consumer wishing it to be so. This isn't exactly the software industry, but it is far closer to it, than a physical economy. Would these same companies be outraged that their *right* to exploit this new technology for profit has been undermined? I'm sorry, but physics cares nothing for your profit motives. If you don't like technology go somewhere else or enter a new business sector. Nobody is guaranteed the right to profit from new technologies. Sometimes it's just "tough".
There are plenty of operating system projects taking different approaches and making innovative, if not immediately useful, new operating systems. And in fact I agree with you that the purpose and utility of operating systems, of software development itself, is shifting and needs to be continuously rethought. But I don't understand why you are suggesting OpenBSD developers drop everything they are doing and become computer science grad students playing with theoretical operating systems. They are trying to make BSD Unix more secure. If you don't like that, fine. But you might as well ask me to build a new house instead of "wasting" my effort insulating my current one this winter.
Re:Christmas isn't about presents
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 2
Well, I'm not Christian (I was nominally "Christian" until I realized I wasn't practicing, and didn't really agree with much of the religion; this happened to coincide nicely with adolescence), but plenty of other religions have a mid-winter "gift-giving" sort of holiday. Now, I'm as rabidly anti-consumerism as the next trendy leftist, but I realize that whatever I think of this holiday, it means something to others.
So I guess I'll just have to come up with some religion neutral name for this gift-giving thing I do.
Sorry, Slashdot mungifier got to my text (I'm still waiting for an explanation as to why Plain Old Text understands HTML tags...not so Plain I suppose)
Um, Unix wasn't designed for speed. Fast Good. Doesn't matter how fast your whizbang kernel is, if everything breaks every revision because there are no safe and clean interfaces (even if they are not published) between components. These days performance is cheap...handling complexity is the real problem. I think we will see, and are already seeing, the Linux kernel become more modular purely out of the weight of the great amount of complexity a humongous monolithic kernel supporting so many features has. Don't program to the computer, program to the human (developer, administrator, or end-user). Clever hacks die fast.
So our ingenious patent law allows somebody to invent something, and then impose arbitrary new licenses on those to which it had previously licensed the unpatented technology, with the one provision that it may not exact previous "damages".
So, then, basically a company can license technology to people it doesn't particularly like, or those it wants to control, then wait a while, while those people produce major products, then WHAM, obtain a patent, and now those people are under your control? Seems like by licensing something, you've *already* given away some rights under contract, and you shouldn't be able to just arbitrarily force others under a new license because you've now patented something that you've licensed to them.
If you grant that source code and the binaries generated from said source code, are in fact, two entirely separate entities, I do not see why it is impossible for a company to sell me ownership of the *binary*, yet not the *source*. I probably will never have need for the source...but if I can still be sold the binary, I can retain rights to reverse-engineering, copying, and various other fair uses.
I guess in your analogy I want to own the ride (so I can ride over and over again, or move the ride around (space shift it)), yet I don't really need to buy all the blueprints and technology that has gone into building the ride.
And what if I just extract setup files and do a manual setup, never once seeing a EULA...what then? In fact, can I even be charged with illegally reverse engineering the setup program if I never agree to the EULA *in* the setup program?
Slashdot Mirror
Jon, why do you insist on writing lengthy articles describing just exactly what we, the various groups in the "geek" community, are? It just sounds like sucking up. Wow, we're *smart*, we're *free thinkers*, we're *team players*, we're *independent*, we're *creative*, oh yeah, did I mention we're *free thinkers*, blah blah blah. Why are you telling this to us? I think "we" know who "we" are (or at least "they" know who "they" are). Do you also write long analytical articles about the character of choir boys, for the choir? If you are going to stereotype, and then fall over yourself flattering any given group of people, at least do so to *a different* group. Next article: Return Return Tab Tab Brace Left Brace Right - Programmers are *smart*, *independent*, *free thinking*, *creative* people!
http://www.20q.net/~20q/
Thinking of "Martin Garbus":
1. Is it classified as? Animal
2. Can it be used in remote areas? Irrelevant
3. Is it a carnivore? Partly
4. Can it run fast? Doubtful
5. Is it a place? No
6. Can it scratch? Yes
7. Does it have whiskers? No
8. Does it live in the forest? No
9. Can it climb? Maybe
10. Does it perform? Yes
11. Is it multicolored? No
12. Is it helpful in the learning process? Yes
13. Is it worth a lot of money? Probably
14. Does it bite? Doubtful
15. Do you use it in public? Depends
16. Does it come from an animal? Yes
17. Would you find it in an office? Yes
18. Would you find it on a farm? Doubtful
19. Do you know any songs about it? No
20. I guess that it is a human? Yes
What the hell was that first babbling "content pirate" questioner about? What is a content pirate? Some lame person who copies other's web graphics or something??
So why haven't theme makers got it through their skull that while they can replicate the look and feel, they can't simply slap another company's trademarked logo on top of their work? Who does this? Come on? Stop it. It's dumb.
There is a whole lot more to look and feel than a few bitmaps of widgets and a color scheme. Apple is just a stingy spoilt brat. They'd sue mirrors for look and feel infringement.
I thought the RBL was a list that ISPs could *voluntarily* use to blacklist sites. So, if Iraq is brutal and violent, then the message is "stay away from this country, do not make any deals with them, etc.". If Napster is infringing on copyright wholesale, the message is "stay away from this service, do not let any of your copyrighted materials pass through it". If you are shooting people in your dorm, the message is "stay away from this dorm, it has a bloody psycho in it running around and killing people".
Are those *unreasonable* precautions that can be voluntarily followed by subscribers? Man, it almost sounds logical.
Um, isn't the RBL *voluntary*? So why the hell are we getting so worked up? If the ISP is mindlessly blocking valid sites on the RBL, then yell at them...or tell them to tell the RBL that those sites are OK.
However, Microsoft still has the patented Evil Secret Escape Pod of subscription-based software...so the minute we see their operating system prices come down (in fact they could even do this themselves on purpose), I expect we'll see most of the other software people are dependent on them for to switch to a subscription basis, and *blam*, they maintain their lock.
This is just the real world - as long as MS's standards are open and not proprietry I have no particular problem with it. In a way it's good that at this time, the birth of the Net, there is a behemoth who can dictate common standards. Without MS I fear the Net would degenerate into conflicting and incompatible rulesets.
Man, replace MS with Novell/DEC/Apple, and I'd think that this was written 20 years ago when networking was just starting. But where is IPX/SPX, AppleTalk, DECNet, etc. now?
Agreed, but...and this is why copyrights are not applied to ideas, but rather to expressions of ideas, such as text or code.
Ok, fine, patents then. They're supposed to be for processes or inventions, but in reality they are applied to ideas. E.g., DeCSS code is an entirely original expression (AFAIK) of an unoriginal idea, but the MPAA is fighting against the ability of others to use that idea (CSS). In reality copyright and patents provide protection for ideas, not just their physical implementations (e.g., a "process" is basically an idea...it doesn't really consist itself of anything physical).
Sorry bud, but you have no right to profit off their work, or to even use their work without their permission.
Who said profit? Who said work? I'm not claiming I have a right to profit off others' work (insofar as the germination of an idea is not quantifiable "work"). But I think that ideas are fundamentally different from physical objects or processes. They are inherently unownable. So yes, although we've been socialized to think of ideas as being "owned" by their creators, they are in fact, short of artifical intervention such as laws, owned by everyone the second they are exposed (the rationale being that no one really creates ideas in an absolute vacuum - they are created within a whole environment of other ideas; since we cannot possible quantify what or whose ideas have contributed to a new idea, we must resign ourselves to accepting that *everybody* has a fair share in the new idea). So, yes, I believe people have the natural "right" to use other's ideas once they are exposed. I thought this was the whole basis for progress. If Ogg patented the wheel, we'd be up a creek wouldn't we?
That's not to say that I have a right to their *code* (which they spent personal, quantifiable effort creating) or any physical product they produce with their idea.
I think we just need to realize that 100 amateur programmers writing and reviewing code, ad-hoc, is not necessarily better than 10 professional software engineers working closely together, using some semi-formal procedure for specification, requirements, collaberation, and coding.
A lot of the most successful open source projects, were originally created by professional programmers (Unix flavors, including BSD; Apache; Mozilla; GNU utilities in general), and still retain some form of regimentation. Linux would not be were it is if Linus et al. let every single developer add their patches in, or modify code, whenever they wanted. Unfortunately this is exactly what happens in many new open source projects under the banner of "freedom"...which ends up producing remarkably mediocre code.
Yes, but when I drive my car, do I *TALK* to it? No, I use appropriate controlling devices for the situation: a steering wheel and pedals. Yet my bicycle handles and pedals are very different. As are airplane controls. The point is, there is no one *perfect* interface. CLI is just wrong for some things. As is a particular type of GUI, etc.
It seems to me, hardware is engineered better (or just simply *more*), because the barrier to entry is high. You don't just create a graphics chip by typing at a keyboard. You need a logical design. Written/drawn down, entered through some circuit construction program. You need real physical materials. You need to undergo an expensive process to make those materials into a physical embodiment of your logic. If you screw up, well, back to the drawing board.
Software on the other hand has a very low barrier to entry. Got a compiler? Got an editor? Great. You're now a software "engineer"! Tappity tap. Hello world. Tappity tap. Hello enterprise. Tappity tap. Hello critical infrastructure. It is simply too easy to "just" fix this, or change that. What if every civil engineer decided that they would "just" tweak this or that parameter and see what happens? Or maybe they'd "just" fix the one faulty bolt. It doesn't happen (plus, a major advance of the industrial age was standardized building components, which software still has very little of). Software engineers, managers, and the industry, need to think of the bytes that make up their software as important as an actual constructed, engineered structure, that one shouldn't make whimsical changes or additions to without much consideration and peer review. Because literally, badly designed software ends up costing just as much, or more, than real physical structures.
All yuor credit cards are belong to us!!
- the h4x0rs
Those buttons are the coolest things since sliced bread. Highlighting a word and hitting Google search, or hitting GoogleScout on a page to find related pages, is really useful. Guess you can tell I like Google.
Yeah, then they'll reason they really only can afford ONE of you, which does ALL the work.
It is much easier to build an economy when you have a basis of ownership. But even Jefferson realized, way back when, before computers or software, that ideas themselves are *unownable*. Repeat that to yourself. *unownable* Because ideas are the basis for the "new economy", the basis for software.
Now that we have established that ideas are unownable, let's just look at what the software industry is. When you go to a software store you pay maybe $50 for some box on a shelf. I'd wager that perhaps 2 to 8 dollars of that might actually be material value, transportation costs, advertising costs, etc. The rest of the money you are paying for an *artificial scarcity*, created by a bunch of people *hoarding ideas*. Wow, that sounds radical. But, if you go back to ideas as unownable, you can see software, as a product, really a result of a group of people who take some ideas, generate some ideas, and then gather in a circle and hoard those ideas. This isn't necessarily Evil. We realize that we have to incentivize people to create stuff, in the face of unownable ideas. The way we do this is with copyright and patents. Now the core of the whole problem is that copyright and patents last *way too long* in the software industry. 75 years is outrages even for a material work (e.g. a book), let alone a piece of software. Chances are, you will *die* before your copyright on piece of text expires. That is just silly. That is stepping far over the bounds of simple incentive. And software gets obsoleted even faster. A year, maybe two or three. I'd say copyright should last maybe five years on software, maybe push it to ten. Do *you* buy any software that is older than ten years? What possible profit motive, other than plain stinginess, the opportunity to screw over that poor old soul with the legacy system, could people have for software this old?
We are allowing people to create kingdoms and empires upon artificial ownership of ideas. So there are a few robin hoods around. It just galls me that software companies, or other types of "media" companies, think that they have an inherent *right* to profit. Imagine a brand new technology is invented tomorrow, by which a material, once it is created, is instantly duplicated just by the consumer wishing it to be so. This isn't exactly the software industry, but it is far closer to it, than a physical economy. Would these same companies be outraged that their *right* to exploit this new technology for profit has been undermined? I'm sorry, but physics cares nothing for your profit motives. If you don't like technology go somewhere else or enter a new business sector. Nobody is guaranteed the right to profit from new technologies. Sometimes it's just "tough".
There are plenty of operating system projects taking different approaches and making innovative, if not immediately useful, new operating systems. And in fact I agree with you that the purpose and utility of operating systems, of software development itself, is shifting and needs to be continuously rethought. But I don't understand why you are suggesting OpenBSD developers drop everything they are doing and become computer science grad students playing with theoretical operating systems. They are trying to make BSD Unix more secure. If you don't like that, fine. But you might as well ask me to build a new house instead of "wasting" my effort insulating my current one this winter.
Well, I'm not Christian (I was nominally "Christian" until I realized I wasn't practicing, and didn't really agree with much of the religion; this happened to coincide nicely with adolescence), but plenty of other religions have a mid-winter "gift-giving" sort of holiday. Now, I'm as rabidly anti-consumerism as the next trendy leftist, but I realize that whatever I think of this holiday, it means something to others.
So I guess I'll just have to come up with some religion neutral name for this gift-giving thing I do.
Oops: Fast Good
Sorry, Slashdot mungifier got to my text (I'm still waiting for an explanation as to why Plain Old Text understands HTML tags...not so Plain I suppose)
Um, Unix wasn't designed for speed. Fast Good. Doesn't matter how fast your whizbang kernel is, if everything breaks every revision because there are no safe and clean interfaces (even if they are not published) between components. These days performance is cheap...handling complexity is the real problem. I think we will see, and are already seeing, the Linux kernel become more modular purely out of the weight of the great amount of complexity a humongous monolithic kernel supporting so many features has. Don't program to the computer, program to the human (developer, administrator, or end-user). Clever hacks die fast.
Interesting...see my sig...
So our ingenious patent law allows somebody to invent something, and then impose arbitrary new licenses on those to which it had previously licensed the unpatented technology, with the one provision that it may not exact previous "damages".
So, then, basically a company can license technology to people it doesn't particularly like, or those it wants to control, then wait a while, while those people produce major products, then WHAM, obtain a patent, and now those people are under your control? Seems like by licensing something, you've *already* given away some rights under contract, and you shouldn't be able to just arbitrarily force others under a new license because you've now patented something that you've licensed to them.
If you grant that source code and the binaries generated from said source code, are in fact, two entirely separate entities, I do not see why it is impossible for a company to sell me ownership of the *binary*, yet not the *source*. I probably will never have need for the source...but if I can still be sold the binary, I can retain rights to reverse-engineering, copying, and various other fair uses.
I guess in your analogy I want to own the ride (so I can ride over and over again, or move the ride around (space shift it)), yet I don't really need to buy all the blueprints and technology that has gone into building the ride.
And what if I just extract setup files and do a manual setup, never once seeing a EULA...what then? In fact, can I even be charged with illegally reverse engineering the setup program if I never agree to the EULA *in* the setup program?