Radio could easily function without corporate filtering. So could you. The answer to your non-radio filters is your peers and friends. Word-of-mouth is what most people use anyway. That's one of the things that makes peer-to-peer sharing so powerful as a marketing tool - people have been sharing music more than ever, and finding new music much easier.
You know, people are always saying that the problem with amateur (i.e. non-corporate) music/art/software/whatever is that the vast majority of it is cruddy. Pick any artist from MP3.com at random, or any project from Sourceforge at random, and chances are the music will be pretty cruddy, or the project will be lifeless...
But you know what all this is? It's called CHOICE. And it has always been there. Corporate sponsorship of creativity and ideas makes it easy for people who don't like to deal with choice to find a couple of good things here and there. But it doesn't particularly foster the best creativity or ideas, only the easiest to market. It doesn't make the world a better place, it only makes shareholders and CEOs richer.
Choice is good, but it does take effort to appreciate.
As the parent acknowledged, in some cases amateur stuff is as good as or better than the pros. People have become so used to being force-fed their ideas that they can't believe that the good ones might also rise to the top in a truly free idea market. But they will - in a free idea market, without corporate sponsorship, the most visible art and ideas will be the ones you hear about most from other people, some of whom you will trust more than others. Much like internet memes, a good artist will quickly and easily become well known in an absense of corporate interest. Unfortunately, as things stand now, corporate interests drown out amateur efforts.
Really?! Wow! That's pretty impressive, considering there is no version of Civ III for Linux anywhere, and certainly not from the out-of-business Loki!
Much to my chagrin, of course, considering I only have Linux on my box...
Unless Walmart starts carrying some of the shrinkwrap Linux software packages, and maybe some 'collection' CD's, they're shooting themselves in the foot by displaying a Linux PC next to reams of Windows-only software.
Well, they're not displaying a Linux PC next to reams of Windows-only software. These Linux-loaded PCs are only available via Walmart.com. You have to be looking for it, or have a friend point it out to you, in order to find it in the first place.
I think you're basically right - Walmart suddenly offering some PCs loaded with Linux is not going to immediately push Linux into the mainstream, like some people seem to think. Furthermore, if Walmart were to present these PCs in their stores as "just like Windows PCs, only cheaper!", they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. But they're not, and I don't think they mean to push Linux into the mainstream.
I think, really, this is like Linux getting it's tonail (not the full toe, and definitely not the full foot) in the door of "pre-installed OS" computers.
I mean, these things have to go in baby steps. In another two years, it's quite possible that Linux could be so much farther on that all the reasons against having these things in stores might be solved. I, for one, hope so. Some elitist geeks might shudder at their niche OS being tainted by "the masses", but I personally see the good outweighing the bad if free software were to end up being used everywhere.
On a slightly unrelated note, I just hope the rewrite it when XFree86 finally supports alpha blending. When alpha blending is a part of X, presumably transparency, shadows, etc. will be faster, easier, and no hacks will be required.
then there will be enough market demand for machines without this restriction that the market will fork
Unless, of course, Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) is successful in his quest to make such machines illegal.
In which case, I'm leaving the country.
Until such time as either a) US laws apply to the whole world, or b) such a law is repealed. In the latter case, I may or may not move back, and in the former, I'm turning Chinese and signing up for their moon colony.
I will take the word of an Astronomer over a movie star or rock star any day of the week when dealing with environmental issues. Heck, I will take Bjorn Lomborg or Patrick Moore over an Astronomer.
He didn't say anything about celebrities, he said Gold wasn't a Geologist. You're the one bringing up celebrities.
Neither is the air supply on Earth infinite so if you are a true environmentalist, I guess you could stop breathing or at least, cut down on that activity.
What an absurd remark. The air supply is recycling as we speak, thanks to that portion of the biomass that breaths CO2 and gives O2 as a waste product. When you burn fossil fuels, they don't recycle themselves back into the ground as more oil. At least, not that we know of.
Even if they do, I'd prefer to have a cleaner, nicer renewable energy source if possible. I don't see why anyone wouldn't.
When the shakeout comes then the hacker community are really going to be tested - without that money it is back to people in their bedrooms churning it out. Are they/we up to it?
In their bedrooms? Real geeks work in their bathrooms with a mini-fridge on the counter!
Yes, as a few others have said, this list leaves out some obvious classics in favor of some obvious blockbusters. eXistenZ is definitely a great movie, and Jurassic Park was a waste of time. Shiney and pretty, yes - good movie, no.
But, come on, Gattaca being a "yawn" ?? Gattaca is an excellent film, and it is science fiction. It's one of the most "real" science fiction films I've ever seen. The acting is superb, and the ending is terribly emotional. No, it doesn't have lasers and battles and monsters and millions of dollars of special effects, but as a sci-fi film I've always thought everyone should go see it. People who complain that sci-fi is just for geeky teens who never really grow up would do themselves a favor by seeing that film. It's quite brilliantly done.
This is really the only weak link in the chain of software for Linux. Personal Finance is one of the main reasons for your average home user to own a computer. Without a good, comprehensive personal finance software package, no one who has no other interest in computers (i.e., most average home users) will care to use Linux.
Kapital seems like the best bet to me. It's Linux-native, open source, though it's not free as in beer, and it looks nice. GnuCash is ugly. These things matter.
Moneydance is also a good bet, though it's not open source. But most people don't really care about that, even if they should.
Still, they both need to beef up on the features, especially Kapital. Sometimes I wonder if Linux developers ever use competing products. The people who write Kapital need to study Quicken and see what they do right.
The best features of Quicken, for me and my acquaintances, are the budgeting and scheduling features. Quicken used to schedule payments in an archaic, counter-intuitive "calendar," but now, at least in Quicken 2002, you can have on the front screen a simple summary of your scheduled payments. It shows you what bills you have upcoming, and really helps in planning.
All I really need is a register interface for entering my transactions, just like Quicken, a budgeting system like the latest Quicken, and an easy way to schedule payments and list my upcoming payments on the startup screen. The first and last are most important; the budgeting features are secondary.
In amongst their screenshots of RISC OS features, they proclaim that you can, at any time, open a terminal window and have access to "Linux-like commands"... erm, shouldn't that really be UNIX-like commands? Since that's where Linux pretty much gets them...
As much as I love the brilliance of the GPL, you have to admit it isn't really [i]true[/i] freedom. You are free to do what you want with GPL code, within limits. You cannot release a program based on GPL code, yet deny anyone the source code. That is a limit.
It's good for technology, but it doesn't tranfer well to naming conventions, which seems to be what RMS wants to do. "You can GNU software in your systems, but you have to call your system 'GNU/*'"...
And I just want to grab him by the beard, shake him, and say "Dude, get a grip!"
I mean, if the premise of his organization, if the mission of his life, is to empower people with the freedom of free-as-in-speech software, then he shouldn't care what it's called, only that they are using free software.
Acknowledging credit is a good thing, but why does it have to be done in a name? If everybody had to do that for everything, than Mandrake Linux would be called Mandrake/Red Hat/GNU/Linux.
A billion other products would have long-ass names. Everyone would have hundreds of last names.
Requiring people to do anything is not a freedom, it's a limit. Requiring that the source code be open and available for software is ensuring people's freedom; it's a technological benefit.
Requiring that everyone who uses your code in any way should call it a certain extra name is just pointless and turns people off. It's not about the GNU, it's about the freedom.
OK, I'm more computer-savvy than your Average Joe - heck, I read SlashDot. I'm a closet geek. But I'm not in the IT industry, nor do I program, nor do I keep close track of all these companies. I have better things to do with my time.
Now, when it comes to desktops, I roll my own, but I've never owned a notebook, and if I were to buy one, I'd buy a brand-name. I always thought Compaq was a good company. People I know and trust have said good things about them, and they even got a good rating on their customer service in this CNet article from December. Plus, both as has been mentioned in other comments here, Compaq and HP were "good for Linux."
Some here have said that Compaq's laptops suck. OK, so I've looked around quickly at the obvious places like ZDProducts.com and CNet, and while they don't have the highest ratings, they seem average and acceptable.
To make a long story short (too late!), my girlfriend just bought a new Compaq Presario 2800 yesterday. And now the merger went through. And now I'm thinking, what if that was a bad decision? We wanted to support a Linux-friendly company, which Gateway is not, and Dell is not, and we wanted better support than she's had through Gateway. We didn't want to buy from a small company; she had a cheapo laptop once before and it had tons of problems. We're both more comfortable with the big players...
So the big question is: what's going to happen to Compaq's support? Any thoughts? Should we try to cancel this order as quickly as possible? Or will everything probably be acceptable?
No, theoretically the audit is not to prove that you own it after you bought it, it's to prove that you own the software that you are running. You can run software that you haven't paid for. For example, Microsoft says you can run software X on Y number of computers. If you run it on a greater number than Y, you're running software that you didn't pay for.
You or I may disagree with their premise, I'm just pointing out that it's not about software you bought, it's about software you're running.
So it doesn't matter what their records show, if they even have any. They're not going to look at their list and say "OK, your company bought a license for MS Office, so that's fine, you paid for a copy" - they're going to come in, look at your computers and say, "OK, you have 100 computers running MS Office - that's 100 licenses you have to show to us."
Idiotic, but that's what they're doing. It's like if you went to a GAP and bought one pair of pants, and then tried to walk about with two pairs. They're going to stop you - you didn't pay for the second pair of pants, so it's not yours.
What it really comes down to is a question of what it means when you buy software. The EULA, which nobody reads, spells it out, but it's not quite what most people think intuitively. People generally expect to be able to install software on more than one machine, because their experience tells them that this is the nature of software.
Unfortunately, I really think the whole "exchanging money for licenses" thing will eventually go the way of 640k limits. The free speech (or beer) alternatives will eventually win out simply by necessity. They exist, they're getting better all the time, and though you could try to force somebody to pay every time they go to the bathroom, ubiquitous free alternative options will turn that situation around!
(I guess some people will always be willing to pay for cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, but if you're talking about my own home bathroom, I just paid for it once, and then I have the proper tools to maintain it myself, and as many people can use it as I care to let use it... OK, this analogy is going to far. Sorry!)
The source of that MP3 can be nothing else but a COPY of a CD.
Wrong. An MP3 is encoded audio. Audio can come from many sources. I listen to many artists whose music I obtained directly, via MP3. No CD was involved. And it doesn't have to be MP3 either, of course.
Digital audio formats are not an added step after purchasing a CD, they are direct competitors to CDs, for doing the work of music distribution.
Limbaugh said he reviewed four different video games and found "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures."
OK, first, I disagree with his sampling methods. Only four? Far too few. There is also no mention of what types of games he played. Did he try Grim Fandango? Or just Quake 3 Arena?
Second, why are movies always the only thing video games are compared with? What about cartoons? Comic strips? Hell, I've read books worse than some video games.
"Conveyance of ideas" and "expression" seems to be gravely misunderstood by this judge. As someone else here already pointed out, images can convey ideas. Photography and paintings are forms of expression that are definitely first amendment protected, unless I am sorely mistaken.
Video games can seem daft and mindless, but they are still a form of creative expression by those who make them. At the very least, for the graphic art included in most modern games. I've been playing Darkened Skye recently, and despite its endless platform jumping at some points, the art makes me catch my breath at times, and what little dialogue there is is very funny at times. It may be little more than a pulp fantasy at times, but it's certainly more entertaining, with more intelligent ideas and thems, than the Doom novels. I hope books are still considered speech...
This is the ideal story for Slashdot - legos, data storage, a big company like IBM, new technology...
I mean, it's like it was tailor-made!
Must have been difficult choosing an icon for the story. I can just imagine the editor agonizing over the little lego, the ibm logo, the hardware nut... or maybe the Borg Gates icon just to get people to read it.
Mr Gates also said that the discounts that Microsoft would have to offer under the proposals for stripped-down versions of Windows would lead to savings for computer makers worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr Gates said his group's sales to computer manufacturers were worth between $6bn-$7bn a year, and that the discounts could reach 25 per cent of those revenues.
Oh, no! Really?! You're telling me that the very people you've pushed around for a decade or so might actually see some benefits when you finally get caught and punished? Wow!
Imagine that, Microsoft's punishment for its unfair stranglehold on the computing industry is a lessening of that stranglehold!
Slashdot Mirror
Radio could easily function without corporate filtering. So could you. The answer to your non-radio filters is your peers and friends. Word-of-mouth is what most people use anyway. That's one of the things that makes peer-to-peer sharing so powerful as a marketing tool - people have been sharing music more than ever, and finding new music much easier.
It's not about capitalism. It's about rampant greed, and the powerful buying themselves laws to hold things back and keep themselves comfortable.
If capitalism and the "free market" were truly functioning, the RIAA and the MPAA wouldn't exist.
You know, people are always saying that the problem with amateur (i.e. non-corporate) music/art/software/whatever is that the vast majority of it is cruddy. Pick any artist from MP3.com at random, or any project from Sourceforge at random, and chances are the music will be pretty cruddy, or the project will be lifeless...
But you know what all this is? It's called CHOICE. And it has always been there. Corporate sponsorship of creativity and ideas makes it easy for people who don't like to deal with choice to find a couple of good things here and there. But it doesn't particularly foster the best creativity or ideas, only the easiest to market. It doesn't make the world a better place, it only makes shareholders and CEOs richer.
Choice is good, but it does take effort to appreciate.
As the parent acknowledged, in some cases amateur stuff is as good as or better than the pros. People have become so used to being force-fed their ideas that they can't believe that the good ones might also rise to the top in a truly free idea market. But they will - in a free idea market, without corporate sponsorship, the most visible art and ideas will be the ones you hear about most from other people, some of whom you will trust more than others. Much like internet memes, a good artist will quickly and easily become well known in an absense of corporate interest. Unfortunately, as things stand now, corporate interests drown out amateur efforts.
And if CmdrTaco goes back and fixes the "to"'s in the dept, it'll also be too little too late.
"I bought Civ III for Linux from Loki."
Really?! Wow! That's pretty impressive, considering there is no version of Civ III for Linux anywhere, and certainly not from the out-of-business Loki!
Much to my chagrin, of course, considering I only have Linux on my box...
"...the extras on the two releases do not overlap so your not wasting money by buying both editions."
I think we have different concepts of what constitutes "wasting money"...!
Well, they're not displaying a Linux PC next to reams of Windows-only software. These Linux-loaded PCs are only available via Walmart.com. You have to be looking for it, or have a friend point it out to you, in order to find it in the first place.
I think you're basically right - Walmart suddenly offering some PCs loaded with Linux is not going to immediately push Linux into the mainstream, like some people seem to think. Furthermore, if Walmart were to present these PCs in their stores as "just like Windows PCs, only cheaper!", they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. But they're not, and I don't think they mean to push Linux into the mainstream.
I think, really, this is like Linux getting it's tonail (not the full toe, and definitely not the full foot) in the door of "pre-installed OS" computers.
I mean, these things have to go in baby steps. In another two years, it's quite possible that Linux could be so much farther on that all the reasons against having these things in stores might be solved. I, for one, hope so. Some elitist geeks might shudder at their niche OS being tainted by "the masses", but I personally see the good outweighing the bad if free software were to end up being used everywhere.
On a slightly unrelated note, I just hope the rewrite it when XFree86 finally supports alpha blending. When alpha blending is a part of X, presumably transparency, shadows, etc. will be faster, easier, and no hacks will be required.
Presumably...
If it happens...
In which case, I'm leaving the country.
Until such time as either a) US laws apply to the whole world, or b) such a law is repealed. In the latter case, I may or may not move back, and in the former, I'm turning Chinese and signing up for their moon colony.
mod parent up!
Now, this is the quality of made-up story we should expect on the annual Slashdot April Fool's day marathon!
How sad it isn't April 1.
I will take the word of an Astronomer over a movie star or rock star any day of the week when dealing with environmental issues. Heck, I will take Bjorn Lomborg or Patrick Moore over an Astronomer.
He didn't say anything about celebrities, he said Gold wasn't a Geologist. You're the one bringing up celebrities.
Neither is the air supply on Earth infinite so if you are a true environmentalist, I guess you could stop breathing or at least, cut down on that activity.
What an absurd remark. The air supply is recycling as we speak, thanks to that portion of the biomass that breaths CO2 and gives O2 as a waste product. When you burn fossil fuels, they don't recycle themselves back into the ground as more oil. At least, not that we know of.
Even if they do, I'd prefer to have a cleaner, nicer renewable energy source if possible. I don't see why anyone wouldn't.
Yes, as a few others have said, this list leaves out some obvious classics in favor of some obvious blockbusters. eXistenZ is definitely a great movie, and Jurassic Park was a waste of time. Shiney and pretty, yes - good movie, no.
But, come on, Gattaca being a "yawn" ?? Gattaca is an excellent film, and it is science fiction. It's one of the most "real" science fiction films I've ever seen. The acting is superb, and the ending is terribly emotional. No, it doesn't have lasers and battles and monsters and millions of dollars of special effects, but as a sci-fi film I've always thought everyone should go see it. People who complain that sci-fi is just for geeky teens who never really grow up would do themselves a favor by seeing that film. It's quite brilliantly done.
This is really the only weak link in the chain of software for Linux. Personal Finance is one of the main reasons for your average home user to own a computer. Without a good, comprehensive personal finance software package, no one who has no other interest in computers (i.e., most average home users) will care to use Linux.
Kapital seems like the best bet to me. It's Linux-native, open source, though it's not free as in beer, and it looks nice. GnuCash is ugly. These things matter.
Moneydance is also a good bet, though it's not open source. But most people don't really care about that, even if they should.
Still, they both need to beef up on the features, especially Kapital. Sometimes I wonder if Linux developers ever use competing products. The people who write Kapital need to study Quicken and see what they do right.
The best features of Quicken, for me and my acquaintances, are the budgeting and scheduling features. Quicken used to schedule payments in an archaic, counter-intuitive "calendar," but now, at least in Quicken 2002, you can have on the front screen a simple summary of your scheduled payments. It shows you what bills you have upcoming, and really helps in planning.
All I really need is a register interface for entering my transactions, just like Quicken, a budgeting system like the latest Quicken, and an easy way to schedule payments and list my upcoming payments on the startup screen. The first and last are most important; the budgeting features are secondary.
In amongst their screenshots of RISC OS features, they proclaim that you can, at any time, open a terminal window and have access to "Linux-like commands" ... erm, shouldn't that really be UNIX-like commands? Since that's where Linux pretty much gets them...
As much as I love the brilliance of the GPL, you have to admit it isn't really [i]true[/i] freedom. You are free to do what you want with GPL code, within limits. You cannot release a program based on GPL code, yet deny anyone the source code. That is a limit.
...
It's good for technology, but it doesn't tranfer well to naming conventions, which seems to be what RMS wants to do. "You can GNU software in your systems, but you have to call your system 'GNU/*'"
And I just want to grab him by the beard, shake him, and say "Dude, get a grip!"
I mean, if the premise of his organization, if the mission of his life, is to empower people with the freedom of free-as-in-speech software, then he shouldn't care what it's called, only that they are using free software.
Acknowledging credit is a good thing, but why does it have to be done in a name? If everybody had to do that for everything, than Mandrake Linux would be called Mandrake/Red Hat/GNU/Linux.
A billion other products would have long-ass names. Everyone would have hundreds of last names.
Requiring people to do anything is not a freedom, it's a limit. Requiring that the source code be open and available for software is ensuring people's freedom; it's a technological benefit.
Requiring that everyone who uses your code in any way should call it a certain extra name is just pointless and turns people off. It's not about the GNU, it's about the freedom.
OK, I'm more computer-savvy than your Average Joe - heck, I read SlashDot. I'm a closet geek. But I'm not in the IT industry, nor do I program, nor do I keep close track of all these companies. I have better things to do with my time.
Now, when it comes to desktops, I roll my own, but I've never owned a notebook, and if I were to buy one, I'd buy a brand-name. I always thought Compaq was a good company. People I know and trust have said good things about them, and they even got a good rating on their customer service in this CNet article from December. Plus, both as has been mentioned in other comments here, Compaq and HP were "good for Linux."
Some here have said that Compaq's laptops suck. OK, so I've looked around quickly at the obvious places like ZDProducts.com and CNet, and while they don't have the highest ratings, they seem average and acceptable.
To make a long story short (too late!), my girlfriend just bought a new Compaq Presario 2800 yesterday. And now the merger went through. And now I'm thinking, what if that was a bad decision? We wanted to support a Linux-friendly company, which Gateway is not, and Dell is not, and we wanted better support than she's had through Gateway. We didn't want to buy from a small company; she had a cheapo laptop once before and it had tons of problems. We're both more comfortable with the big players...
So the big question is: what's going to happen to Compaq's support? Any thoughts? Should we try to cancel this order as quickly as possible? Or will everything probably be acceptable?
No, theoretically the audit is not to prove that you own it after you bought it, it's to prove that you own the software that you are running. You can run software that you haven't paid for. For example, Microsoft says you can run software X on Y number of computers. If you run it on a greater number than Y, you're running software that you didn't pay for.
You or I may disagree with their premise, I'm just pointing out that it's not about software you bought, it's about software you're running.
So it doesn't matter what their records show, if they even have any. They're not going to look at their list and say "OK, your company bought a license for MS Office, so that's fine, you paid for a copy" - they're going to come in, look at your computers and say, "OK, you have 100 computers running MS Office - that's 100 licenses you have to show to us."
Idiotic, but that's what they're doing. It's like if you went to a GAP and bought one pair of pants, and then tried to walk about with two pairs. They're going to stop you - you didn't pay for the second pair of pants, so it's not yours.
What it really comes down to is a question of what it means when you buy software. The EULA, which nobody reads, spells it out, but it's not quite what most people think intuitively. People generally expect to be able to install software on more than one machine, because their experience tells them that this is the nature of software.
Unfortunately, I really think the whole "exchanging money for licenses" thing will eventually go the way of 640k limits. The free speech (or beer) alternatives will eventually win out simply by necessity. They exist, they're getting better all the time, and though you could try to force somebody to pay every time they go to the bathroom, ubiquitous free alternative options will turn that situation around!
(I guess some people will always be willing to pay for cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, but if you're talking about my own home bathroom, I just paid for it once, and then I have the proper tools to maintain it myself, and as many people can use it as I care to let use it... OK, this analogy is going to far. Sorry!)
Wrong. An MP3 is encoded audio. Audio can come from many sources. I listen to many artists whose music I obtained directly, via MP3. No CD was involved. And it doesn't have to be MP3 either, of course.
Digital audio formats are not an added step after purchasing a CD, they are direct competitors to CDs, for doing the work of music distribution.
OK, first, I disagree with his sampling methods. Only four? Far too few. There is also no mention of what types of games he played. Did he try Grim Fandango? Or just Quake 3 Arena?
Second, why are movies always the only thing video games are compared with? What about cartoons? Comic strips? Hell, I've read books worse than some video games.
"Conveyance of ideas" and "expression" seems to be gravely misunderstood by this judge. As someone else here already pointed out, images can convey ideas. Photography and paintings are forms of expression that are definitely first amendment protected, unless I am sorely mistaken.
Video games can seem daft and mindless, but they are still a form of creative expression by those who make them. At the very least, for the graphic art included in most modern games. I've been playing Darkened Skye recently, and despite its endless platform jumping at some points, the art makes me catch my breath at times, and what little dialogue there is is very funny at times. It may be little more than a pulp fantasy at times, but it's certainly more entertaining, with more intelligent ideas and thems, than the Doom novels. I hope books are still considered speech...
Sorry, I can't keep my pants on. The nanobots keep dissolving them.
This is the ideal story for Slashdot - legos, data storage, a big company like IBM, new technology...
I mean, it's like it was tailor-made!
Must have been difficult choosing an icon for the story. I can just imagine the editor agonizing over the little lego, the ibm logo, the hardware nut... or maybe the Borg Gates icon just to get people to read it.
Oh, no! Really?! You're telling me that the very people you've pushed around for a decade or so might actually see some benefits when you finally get caught and punished? Wow!
Imagine that, Microsoft's punishment for its unfair stranglehold on the computing industry is a lessening of that stranglehold!
I'm cryin' here...
Seriously, if you have difficulty with jargon, you just might want to avoid this site. I mean, the name of the site alone! Slashdot! Sheesh!