You make good points. It's the "done better in code" aspect that I was pushing. So many things are done by the artists today simply because that's how they were done 10 years ago. Hopefully that will change in the future and we'll see procedurally generated characters, animations and whole environments a lot more often.
I know what you're going to say, you're a programmer, you can't make content. Lies! No, I'm not seriously suggesting you break out Blender or even 3d Studio. What I'm suggesting is that you, as a programmer, develop new and exciting tools for content creations. For example, how many open source tree generators are there available that are suitable for use with open source graphics engines? Zilch. Another example, can you write an algorithm that can turn a description of an animal's skeleton and how much weight there is on various points of that skeleton into a walking animation? How about a running animation? How about fighting animations? Can you write an algorithm that turns that same input into a fleshed out 3d model? You can? Great, we're half way to making all the content we could ever want.
"Programmer art" should not be a derogatory term for content whipped up by non-professionals.
Was a time where we used the term "virus" to refer to a self replicating piece of code that didn't rely on exploits to move around. We used the term "worm" to refer to code that did rely on exploits. So even in the most secure operating environment you could still have a virus, but you couldn't have a worm. Of course, now-a-days everyone refers to viruses as worms and worms as viruses. As long as the operating system is performing actions on behalf of the user you will have software that does what the author wants but not what the user wants. The only real way to stop that is to make the user do everything themselves.. that is, it's completely impractical to stop. Stop-gap measures like virus/worm/spyware/malware detection, quarantine and elimination will always be necessary to mitigate the damage these nasties can do.
As far as the market is concerned, that's exactly the same thing. You are not paying for their product. It doesn't matter, in an economic sense, whether you abstain from using software, use a free alternative, or protest outside their offices. What *does* make a difference to the market is if you look at their *competitors* and buy the product that is cheaper. But no-one does that. Software can't actually compete in that way. Which is why applying traditional economic arguments to software is so stupid in the first place.
Of course it isn't good for users. People who argue that it is just don't get free software. Question is, what are we going to do about it? The free software versions of these drivers are totally *ignored* by the development community. Consider the 'nv' driver. It doesn't have any hardware acceleration support, fine, ok, I can understand that, it's a proprietary secret buried in a driver most people are forbidden from reverse engineering. But what about twinview support? There's nothing special about that. A skilled X11 programmer could implement that support in a couple of days. Does anyone do it? No, why would they, 99% of people don't use the nv driver. It's one thing to prohibit proprietary drivers, it's quite another to compete against them.
Here's the thing, we're not talking about proprietary Linux kernel modules. We're talking about proprietary X11 modules. X11 is BSD licensed. These people are completely out to lunch.
seriously, millions of Linux users? Riight. I'd just like to point out that the only drivers that nVidia and ATI keep proprietary are the X11 drivers. Which are permissible because X11 is BSD licensed:)
Yep, that makes as much sense as becoming vegetarian. You are not significant. Your contribution to a third class graphics card company will not make their products any better. As for a legal can of worms, who cares? If they sue us, how much good will does that show?
More to the point, if it doesn't then it is clearly the case that distributing *any* proprietary Linux driver is a violation of the copyright of "me and others who actually wrote it", even if you're not distributing the Linux kernel along with the driver, because according to these terms a proprietary Linux driver is a "derived work".
Meh, I say let the kernel developer hire the services of a lawyer to send a proper cease and desist letter. If he's not willing to spend money to make this official then he's clearly not willing to spend money to go to court over the matter. What a load of shit.
Dude, the problem is not "we don't have drivers", the problem is we don't have *free* drivers. As long as we are reliant on the hardware manufacturers to update their drivers and support the Linux community, we'll never have good hardware support. The Linux community has to support itself, and the only way we can do that is with free drivers.
BTW - if you reply to this post with "but no-one charges money for drivers" I will track you down and kill you ok?
Ya know what? I agree that the Linux community needs to "do something" to get hardware to "just work". But I completely disagree with your suggestion. My suggestion is that what we need to do about it is actively reverse engineer the proprietary drivers they supply and write open source ones. More importantly, I intend to start doing this in the near future. I hope other people will join me.
Ya know what? I've asked about 20 different lawyers about the copyright on the Linux kernel. Half of them say that for the copyright on the Linux kernel to be successfully defended you would need only one copyright holder to sue. The other half say that no single copyright holder could sue, you'd need all of them. Who is right? Even the lawyers can't agree.
Wow, what a completely null argument. You might as well say a movie ticket and a parking fine are the same thing because they both have dates and times on them.
Leave the legal arguments to the lawyers already. If someone doesn't like you linking X component with Y component, the very first thing you should ask them is: are you the copyright holder of X component or Y component? If the answer is "no" then kindly ask them to go away. Only the copyright holder can sue you so why should you pay any attention to them. If you are so worried about someone suing you, just call up the only people who can sue you, the copyright holders, and ask them if what you are doing is ok. If they say yes, put that on your web site and tell the distractors to piss off.
The only reason Second Life has DRM is that they're trying to make a world that approximates the real world, instead of just abandoning real world models as unsuitable for a virtual environment and present a world without artifical scarcity.
But this is why I say Second Life is a vision of the future. Eventually humans will have the technology to make everything cheap and available to anyone who wants it. But will we allow that technology to be used? Or will we cripple it with restrictions that are hard to impossible to remove? I believe Second Life shows that we will cripple it. We will want to hang onto the models of reality that we understand. More specifically the people who have power will want to hang onto that power.
I'd like to take a moment to coin a new "law" that I have observed in recent years. Maybe I'm just seeing something "new" where there is nothing. Maybe I'm just wrong. But let me propose that hyperbole has a profound effect on language. As actual occurences of some objectionable activity becomes less and less prevailent in society, the tempation to use hyperbole to imply that some lesser action is equivilent to that objectional activity becomes more common. The above "story" has two examples of it. First, there's Google who have used hyperbole to justify their self interested actions of rejecting some stories. They've claimed something is "hate speech" to make a point that it is not the content they want on their web site. In response, the sites being chucked have used hyperbole to suggest that Google is "censoring" them. Nevermind the fact that no actual hate speech has occured. Nevermind the fact that Google has not stopped these sites from delivering their content directly to interested parties. How does this affect language? If more people are refering to behaviour as "hate speech" when in fact a better description would be a "bitch session", doesn't that change the definition of the word? What if censorship were completely eliminated (as it is in most western societies, with the obvious exceptions to matters of national security) and the word were used to refer to other behaviour, like telling someone to shut the hell up because you're sick of hearing them blabber. "Can you two go argue in the lunch room, you're giving me a headache." "Hey man, you can't censor us!" What's annoying is that these are really important words. You can't talk about keeping the world safe from censorship with a straight face when every idiot is claiming they are being censored.
No, you're just being a pedantic ass. We are talking about "protest" in the sense of the phrase "a peaceful protest". You are talking about "protest" in the sense of the phrase "why, Sir, I do protest!" With people who are not complete asses one can typically use a word without attracting complaints that one is not making universal statements. We call it a context. Now if you'd like to continue claiming that it is sensible to organise a peaceful protest to air a grievance that you may or may not aquire in the future, please do it somewhere else.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Obviously if someone is going to kill you tomorrow the last thing you should do is go picket their offices. "What do we want?" "Our Lives." "When do we want it?" "Uhh, now!... but and later too!" There's a time to protest and there's a time to fight. The time to protest is after you've lost the fight.
I hardly think you can appeal to the current state of copyright/patent law to justify introducing artifical scarcity. Fast forward to the future, people are dying on the street because they can't replicate food, how can you justify that? In Second Life it's just a game, there's little to no suffering, so there's little to no ethical issues with DRM, but in the future people will suffer from DRM, and when I look at Second Life I can see that future.
This, of course, is not justification for opposing DRM right now. There is no valid slippery slope argument that makes hating Second Life because of what it means for the future. I am simply saying that if the technology ever becomes available to make replication a viable option it will not be the start of a golden age of plenty, it will be the start of a desponic age of artificial scarcity.
I think the real difference is that Ghandi was protesting about the tyranny that he and his countrymen were already experiencing, whereas these bozos (and people who protest about new laws, etc) are protesting about tyranny that may or may not happen in the future. The dystopian future that DRM promises is certainly something work discussing and fighting against.. but it is not something you can protest because it hasn't happened yet.
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You make good points. It's the "done better in code" aspect that I was pushing. So many things are done by the artists today simply because that's how they were done 10 years ago. Hopefully that will change in the future and we'll see procedurally generated characters, animations and whole environments a lot more often.
I know what you're going to say, you're a programmer, you can't make content. Lies! No, I'm not seriously suggesting you break out Blender or even 3d Studio. What I'm suggesting is that you, as a programmer, develop new and exciting tools for content creations. For example, how many open source tree generators are there available that are suitable for use with open source graphics engines? Zilch. Another example, can you write an algorithm that can turn a description of an animal's skeleton and how much weight there is on various points of that skeleton into a walking animation? How about a running animation? How about fighting animations? Can you write an algorithm that turns that same input into a fleshed out 3d model? You can? Great, we're half way to making all the content we could ever want.
"Programmer art" should not be a derogatory term for content whipped up by non-professionals.
THERE IS NO NEED FOR DRM. I said that. Maybe if you tell me what you believe the need for DRM is I could tell you.
Why don't we see that already?
Was a time where we used the term "virus" to refer to a self replicating piece of code that didn't rely on exploits to move around. We used the term "worm" to refer to code that did rely on exploits. So even in the most secure operating environment you could still have a virus, but you couldn't have a worm. Of course, now-a-days everyone refers to viruses as worms and worms as viruses. As long as the operating system is performing actions on behalf of the user you will have software that does what the author wants but not what the user wants. The only real way to stop that is to make the user do everything themselves.. that is, it's completely impractical to stop. Stop-gap measures like virus/worm/spyware/malware detection, quarantine and elimination will always be necessary to mitigate the damage these nasties can do.
As far as the market is concerned, that's exactly the same thing. You are not paying for their product. It doesn't matter, in an economic sense, whether you abstain from using software, use a free alternative, or protest outside their offices. What *does* make a difference to the market is if you look at their *competitors* and buy the product that is cheaper. But no-one does that. Software can't actually compete in that way. Which is why applying traditional economic arguments to software is so stupid in the first place.
Of course it isn't good for users. People who argue that it is just don't get free software. Question is, what are we going to do about it? The free software versions of these drivers are totally *ignored* by the development community. Consider the 'nv' driver. It doesn't have any hardware acceleration support, fine, ok, I can understand that, it's a proprietary secret buried in a driver most people are forbidden from reverse engineering. But what about twinview support? There's nothing special about that. A skilled X11 programmer could implement that support in a couple of days. Does anyone do it? No, why would they, 99% of people don't use the nv driver. It's one thing to prohibit proprietary drivers, it's quite another to compete against them.
No, the kernel modules are GPL.
Which is why I can't understand WTF this is all about.
Here's the thing, we're not talking about proprietary Linux kernel modules. We're talking about proprietary X11 modules. X11 is BSD licensed. These people are completely out to lunch.
seriously, millions of Linux users? Riight. I'd just like to point out that the only drivers that nVidia and ATI keep proprietary are the X11 drivers. Which are permissible because X11 is BSD licensed :)
Yep, that makes as much sense as becoming vegetarian. You are not significant. Your contribution to a third class graphics card company will not make their products any better. As for a legal can of worms, who cares? If they sue us, how much good will does that show?
More to the point, if it doesn't then it is clearly the case that distributing *any* proprietary Linux driver is a violation of the copyright of "me and others who actually wrote it", even if you're not distributing the Linux kernel along with the driver, because according to these terms a proprietary Linux driver is a "derived work".
I don't understand. I really don't.
WTF is going on here.
Meh, I say let the kernel developer hire the services of a lawyer to send a proper cease and desist letter. If he's not willing to spend money to make this official then he's clearly not willing to spend money to go to court over the matter. What a load of shit.
Dude, the problem is not "we don't have drivers", the problem is we don't have *free* drivers. As long as we are reliant on the hardware manufacturers to update their drivers and support the Linux community, we'll never have good hardware support. The Linux community has to support itself, and the only way we can do that is with free drivers.
BTW - if you reply to this post with "but no-one charges money for drivers" I will track you down and kill you ok?
Ya know what? I agree that the Linux community needs to "do something" to get hardware to "just work". But I completely disagree with your suggestion. My suggestion is that what we need to do about it is actively reverse engineer the proprietary drivers they supply and write open source ones. More importantly, I intend to start doing this in the near future. I hope other people will join me.
Ya know what? I've asked about 20 different lawyers about the copyright on the Linux kernel. Half of them say that for the copyright on the Linux kernel to be successfully defended you would need only one copyright holder to sue. The other half say that no single copyright holder could sue, you'd need all of them. Who is right? Even the lawyers can't agree.
Wow, what a completely null argument. You might as well say a movie ticket and a parking fine are the same thing because they both have dates and times on them.
Leave the legal arguments to the lawyers already. If someone doesn't like you linking X component with Y component, the very first thing you should ask them is: are you the copyright holder of X component or Y component? If the answer is "no" then kindly ask them to go away. Only the copyright holder can sue you so why should you pay any attention to them. If you are so worried about someone suing you, just call up the only people who can sue you, the copyright holders, and ask them if what you are doing is ok. If they say yes, put that on your web site and tell the distractors to piss off.
The only "need" for DRM is greed.
The only reason Second Life has DRM is that they're trying to make a world that approximates the real world, instead of just abandoning real world models as unsuitable for a virtual environment and present a world without artifical scarcity.
But this is why I say Second Life is a vision of the future. Eventually humans will have the technology to make everything cheap and available to anyone who wants it. But will we allow that technology to be used? Or will we cripple it with restrictions that are hard to impossible to remove? I believe Second Life shows that we will cripple it. We will want to hang onto the models of reality that we understand. More specifically the people who have power will want to hang onto that power.
I'd like to take a moment to coin a new "law" that I have observed in recent years. Maybe I'm just seeing something "new" where there is nothing. Maybe I'm just wrong. But let me propose that hyperbole has a profound effect on language. As actual occurences of some objectionable activity becomes less and less prevailent in society, the tempation to use hyperbole to imply that some lesser action is equivilent to that objectional activity becomes more common. The above "story" has two examples of it. First, there's Google who have used hyperbole to justify their self interested actions of rejecting some stories. They've claimed something is "hate speech" to make a point that it is not the content they want on their web site. In response, the sites being chucked have used hyperbole to suggest that Google is "censoring" them. Nevermind the fact that no actual hate speech has occured. Nevermind the fact that Google has not stopped these sites from delivering their content directly to interested parties. How does this affect language? If more people are refering to behaviour as "hate speech" when in fact a better description would be a "bitch session", doesn't that change the definition of the word? What if censorship were completely eliminated (as it is in most western societies, with the obvious exceptions to matters of national security) and the word were used to refer to other behaviour, like telling someone to shut the hell up because you're sick of hearing them blabber. "Can you two go argue in the lunch room, you're giving me a headache." "Hey man, you can't censor us!" What's annoying is that these are really important words. You can't talk about keeping the world safe from censorship with a straight face when every idiot is claiming they are being censored.
No, you're just being a pedantic ass. We are talking about "protest" in the sense of the phrase "a peaceful protest". You are talking about "protest" in the sense of the phrase "why, Sir, I do protest!" With people who are not complete asses one can typically use a word without attracting complaints that one is not making universal statements. We call it a context. Now if you'd like to continue claiming that it is sensible to organise a peaceful protest to air a grievance that you may or may not aquire in the future, please do it somewhere else.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Obviously if someone is going to kill you tomorrow the last thing you should do is go picket their offices. "What do we want?" "Our Lives." "When do we want it?" "Uhh, now! ... but and later too!" There's a time to protest and there's a time to fight. The time to protest is after you've lost the fight.
Why not teach em FORTRAN too?
Have a . Teach em something that is actually useful.
I hardly think you can appeal to the current state of copyright/patent law to justify introducing artifical scarcity. Fast forward to the future, people are dying on the street because they can't replicate food, how can you justify that? In Second Life it's just a game, there's little to no suffering, so there's little to no ethical issues with DRM, but in the future people will suffer from DRM, and when I look at Second Life I can see that future.
This, of course, is not justification for opposing DRM right now. There is no valid slippery slope argument that makes hating Second Life because of what it means for the future. I am simply saying that if the technology ever becomes available to make replication a viable option it will not be the start of a golden age of plenty, it will be the start of a desponic age of artificial scarcity.
I think the real difference is that Ghandi was protesting about the tyranny that he and his countrymen were already experiencing, whereas these bozos (and people who protest about new laws, etc) are protesting about tyranny that may or may not happen in the future. The dystopian future that DRM promises is certainly something work discussing and fighting against.. but it is not something you can protest because it hasn't happened yet.