The record industry is trying to hoodwink the record buy public with SACD and DVD/A, which promises to be "Even closer to the master recording!". Of course, they attempt to make both formats difficult to pirate, complete with watermarks and no digital outs.
I expect both formats to go over like a led zepplin. When audio professionals are arguing about whether these formats sound significantly better, and when people are perfectly happy with inferior-sounding mp3s, I do not think the public wants a better sounding format.
I think the public wants better music and lower prices. Personally, I want the little guy to become more important; I am sick of a hierarchy which makes a very few famous musicians Gods and the rest peons.
I really think the record companies lost it when the internet boom happened. Their reaction to piracy by strong-arm tactics with legislators backfired. While this worked in the early 1990s with the HRRA, when the media controlled the communication channels, such techniques do not fly when communication channels are open.
I think people will continue to enjoy music in large numbers; I currently am enjoying a Mexican group called Kabah. I just do not think the current distribution model makes as much sense any more.
Let me restate that I think pirating mp3s is wrong; it is immoral to download a song without the copyright owner's permission.
I think what happened is that a lot of hackers saw a really neat project and had a flurry of interest in said project. However, a lot of free software developers lose interest in a given project rather quickly; once the open Netscape 4.xx codebase was ported to various toolkits, people looked at the source code and realized that the code was unmaintainable, being a victim of ultrarapid software development in the dot-com boom.
What happened at that point is that the code base was abandoned, which allowed the Mozilla project to start in earnest. Of course, completely rewriting Netscape with a new license is not a trivial task. People were bemoaning Mozilla for taking so long to write their code as IE became the dominant browser.
What people do not realize is that free software devlopment takes time; people often times aren't getting paid to do the work and there is a strong attitude it is better to do it right slowly than to do it wrong quickly. As long as the software project is not abadoned, the software will eventually have a 1.0 release. It took Mozilla about four years to come out with a 1.0 release; this is remarkably fast in the free software world. As just one comparison, the GNU project was started in 1983; there was not a usable Unix system using 100% free software until about 1992 or so. Technically, the GNU project is still not complete after 20 years.
One thing I would like ot bring up is that, in my experience, khtml handles some lousy dhtml sites better. While I much prefer Mozilla most of the time (more features, and, most importantly, more stable than konqueror), there are certain sites with loust DHTML which Mozilla will plain simply not render. Konqueror seems to better render sites which were only tested with Microsoft IE.
In fact, the college I go to uses, for its on-line registration, such a site; this site refuses to allow me to sign on for on-line classes in Mozilla. However, Konqueror can render the page well enough so that I don't have to get on the phone to add classes or view my schedule.
As an aside, the team which designed the web page were very incompetent (to give credit where credit is due, Unisys was one of the companies doing the contracting; other parties responsible for this fiasco will not be named because no one else responsible has attacked the free software movement). These same people also destroyed the computer database of students who were to receive financial aid when transferring it to the new system, forcing each and every student who wanted finanacial aid to completely resubmit any and all paperwork.
Heh... You know, I just realized that my.sig might be considered a little... conflicting... considering the subject.
Nope. Look at my other recent comments for this article. Two out of three unpaid recursive DNS server implentors agree: DNS is a monster.
The third one may or may not hate DNS; I have just shot him an email seeing whether DNS gets a rotten tomatoes score of 33% or 0%.
Note for the trolls: People who judge DNS without having written their own recursive DNS server are like people who judge a movie based on its preview. Asking a BIND developer what they think of DNS is like asking a certain director what they think of Star Trek V.
I think such an organization would best be done by "number of unique IDs which posted to a given article". Then again, our back of the envelope idea here may not work; I have no idea how Slashdot stores stories and articles. I just recently pointed out some problems with the details of a similiar back of the envelope brainstorming session which Slashdot recently had. I had the same idea myself, but the fact someone else had it made me really think about how to go about doing it.
My gut instinct is that Slashdot stores comments to articles in such a way that sorting artcles based on activity is non-trivial. Personally, I prefer the scoop engine, which has less editor control and more encourages people to post to older artcles.
Glad to see you are enjoying time with your wife, Rob.
I, on the other hand, was bored enough to read this article here a few days back. Perhaps I should aspire to have a life the way you seem to.
While I have you attention, I wish there was some way to encourage people to post smart things to older articles. There was an article about DNS a day ago; alas, I did not have time when the article was posted to post anything more than a single rant; I now have finally gotten enough time together to write a number of actually useful postings; which, because of my timing, will not get read.
This is what I prefer about Usenet; if someone has something worth saying, but it takes them a week to say it, what they say will have an audience. Slashdot, on the other hand, has a 1-2 hour time frame for someone to post an comment on a given topic before it goes off the front page.
The cache-is-full-so-prune requirement can use an oldest-not-updated-record then oldest-record method to determine what to replace in the event the local cache is filled.
This, as it turns out, is not the most ideal way of purging records from the cache. It will really slow things down when you cache starts to fill up and need to prune records from the database. Or slow things down when putting new records in the cache, depending on the implementation details.
You are making the same kind of mistake the original DNS designers made: You have come up with a clever idea which sounds good on the back of a napkin, but has some fairly serious issues when actually implemented.
The problems this idea has is left as an exercise to the reader.
In the real world, it makes more sense to have a list of records in our cache. Every time a record is added to the cache, it is put at the top of the list. Every time a record is accessed from the cache, the record is placed at the top of said list. When the cache starts filling up, we erase records from the bottom of the cache.
There is no need to make a distinction between expired and un-expired records (if we actually implement the parent post's idea); if an expired record is being accessed on a regular basis, it is probably a really bad idea to erase said record from the cache.
First of all, if an attackers has poisoned your cache, that almost always requires Admin intervention anyhow.
Hmmm, pretty new to DNS, I see. Trust me, the original DNS spec makes it trivial to poison caches; BIND, until about five years ago, allowed anyone on the internet with a domain to put any record they wanted to in your DNS cache.
DNS is, for the uninitiated, far worse than anyting you can possibly imagine.
More information
Looks like a lot of idiots haven't read past your first paragraph. What you are requesting is, when a record expires, for the DNS server to mark the record as "expired" instead of deleting it then and there.
Then, if the DNS server is unable to get a reply from any of the DNS servers in the active cache, it looks for an expired version of the same record, giving that to the end user. Since expired records are not accessed that often, they will usually get cleaned out when our list of allocated records fill up and we throw away records which have not been recently accessed.
OK, this would take a week for me to do for MaraDNS. I have actually been thinking of something myself; you are lucky that you caught me at one of the rare periods when I am actually adding features to MaraDNS.
BTW, MaraDNS can already set the maximum number of records in the cache, and the minimum TTL for records. But, as the idiots replying to you pointed out, setting a minimum TTL of one year is probably not a good idea. A minimum TTL of one day, however, may actually make sense.
If you've never written to the protocol, how do you know it's bad?
I have single-handendly written a working recursive DNS server without getting paid for my work. There is a reason why there are only threeofus in the entire world; DNS is that bad. Actually, it is a good deal worse than you can imagine.
Let me put it this way. Writing a DNS client (or a non-recursive DNS server) is sort of like Highlander I. Entertaining, really. You think to youself "Hey! That was easy! A recursive server can't be too bad!"
Well, writing a working recursive DNS server is like watching Highlander II. Suddenly, just as Highlander II changes your outlook on the entire Highlander franchise, writing a recursive DNS server changes your outlook on the entire DNS protocol.
But, hey, don't take my word for it. Dan, one of the other three of us, feels the same way. Thomas, the last of us, has made no statements either for or against DNS. If we were to review recursive DNS the same way Rotten Tomatoes reviews movies, DNS would get a 0%; possibly a 33% if Thomas secretly loves DNS and hasn't told anyone. By any standard, that makes for a bomb that should have tanked at the box office.
Alas, it didn't. And so we are stuck with a horrible mess of a protocol today.
Your punishment is very simple: You are to write a functioning recursive DNS server.
This server has to resolve domains well enough to give an end-user a satisfactory web surfing experience.
After doing this, you will then post an essay to Slashdot concerning your opinion of the DNS spec and well-designed it is.
You will, I assure you, have an experience akin to seeing the movie Highlander II. You hopes for DNS being a decent protocol will become, rather quickly, a big dissapointment.
But don't take my word for it. Don't take Dan Bernstein's word for it. Do it yourself and become an exclusive member of the club of People Crazy Enough to Actually Write a
Recursive DNS Server.
After all, we all know that people who log in as anonymous cowards and flame free software developers are the best programmers that the world has; I am sure you can do this in a week.
Once you do this, you too will know why a number of DNSserverprojects die around the point when the potential DNS implementor in question looks at how recursive resolution is actually done.
If you continue to flame free software developers after doing this, your punishment will be escalated to having to write a recursive DNS server which recursively resolves names according to RFC 1034, while not having any security problems.
If you persist in your flaming ways after doing that, your next punsihment will be to write a C++ compiler which implements everything in the C++ spec, and release said compiler under the GPL.
And, if you continue to insist on flaming free software devlopers after that...well, you won't be, by this point. You'll be too busily getting flamed by anonymous cowards on Slashdot to do any flaming yourself.
Well, unless you count the fact that I wrote open source software living off of the savings I earned after working as a contracter for Microsoft for three months.
John Carmack has posted here that all of the Linux games, combined sold as well as a single moderately sucessful Windows game.
Now, I myself bought a few Loki games, even ones which do not run on my present computer (ugh, no 3d acceleration): Heretic II, Quake III, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Railroad Tycoon, and Alpha Centauri.
However, I think many people, even people who use Linux, do not understand that with freedom comes responsibility. Such people have a Windows partition on their own computer; do not develop libre software nor contribute to Linux in any other meaningful way. These people are not willing to make real sacrifices to have a libre system, and will not wait six months and pay a little more for the privledge of not having to dual-boot. In fact, such freeloaders often times pirate video games instead of paying for them, so they don't help the development of games for Windows either.
As an implementor of a DNS server, I completely agree with you. In fact, I have had some thoughts of doing something similiar myself; I would love to have a DNS-like-protocol which requires some kind of secure authentication, has a handshake which determines the version of the protocol that the server is running, has full unicode support, and uses IPs instead of names for ns, mx, and other indirection, and does not have CNAME records.
The question is: Who is going to develop such a protocol? I have heard a lot of mumbling for a DNS replacment; I have seen little actual action done to make such a replacment. If such a protocol gets developed, I most assurably will be one of the first to implement.
What real solutions do people have to the fragile root servers issue (these days, the fragile.com servers issue).
I kindly ask all of you that live in California to perform these instructions, as Kazaa asks you to let your computer perform their instructions.
Ahem! (clears throat)
There is a very clear difference between human-readable instructions and computer-readable
instructions. Kazaa is object code which is only designed to be read by a computer; your joint-making instructions are designed to be read by a human.
In fact, there is some precedent that the source code of a program can be legally protected free speech. However, once the program is compiled, and the source code is no longer available, it is no longer speech, and is now a device, akin to a machine.
So, yes, your argument can hold water if you were only talking about source code; compiled object code is a different kettle of fish.
I downloaded well over 2000 mp3's and 10 movies with KazaaLite
OK, you just admitted that you use this software for downloading pirated content. Now, the judge knows very well that people do not use file sharing programs to share pictures of their Aunt Tillie with people on the internet; people use the file sharing program, by and large, to share pirated content. In fact, the euphemism "File sharing" for piracy has been around at least since the early 1990s (e.g.: FSP).
The fact of the matter is that, while people could use Kazaa for downloading only Linux distributions, nobody does; as an aside, if the content is legal (such as linux distributions), there seems to be no lack of FTP and WWW servers which have the content in question.
Another thing: The word "piracy" for copyright violation has been a part of the English language since before the early 1980s. Enough people have used it in this sense for the word to be in dictionaries; please don't try to undefine a word just because it gives an ugly name to something a lot of Slashdot user do.
I really don't know when Slashdot stopped being targetted to free software users, and started being targetted to people who are internet media pirates.
What if your code is 50 lines long, and 200 other contributors not in any legal partnership with you (unless the GPL forces that relationship) grow the project to 500,000 lines of code. Since it all was based on your code, do you have the option of releasing that 500,000 line project under a more restricted license?
You get a mess that is very difficult to legally handle. In fact, the FSF is very adamant about all contributions to FSF code having their copyright signed over to the FSF. They feel that the number of copyright holders of the Linux kernel will make any GPL violation court case with the Linux kernel harder to win.
I am anything but a Sun advocate, but I must point out here that Solaris has all sorts of things useful for people running mission-critical servers that Linux doesn't have yet, such as kernel crash dumps.
we will all just have all of the songs, TV shows and movies of all time on all of our local hard drives
My question is this: How will people get paid to make songs, TV shows and movies?
I will give you this much: With current technology, we can feasibly have talented musicians come up with business models which allow them to give their music away; multitracking and samplers allows one talented musician to record all of the parts of a song; computer technology makes a good multitrack studio cost about $1000 these days, as opposed to the approximate $10,000 cost ten years ago, and the $100,000 cost 25 years ago [1]. So, for people who enjoy the kind of music a single musician working hard can record in their basement, there will probably be enough such musicians giving away their music to make enjoying music for free feasible.
In fact, I have found a lot of really good music on mp3.com. The main problem is separating the wheat from the chaff; then again, I don't like most music the radios play.
This does not address the issue of making TV Shows and Movies. To make a TV show or movie, one needs actors, sets, filimg crews, and sound crews. It may be possible, in the future, to have programs which use a computer to simulate acors, sets, etc. via computer models. It will only be possible to make affoordible video content when we have this kind of technological leap.
What a lot of people on Slashdot seem to be incapable of understanding is that it costs real money to make compelling audio-video content. They think that movies magically appear out of thin air, and at zero cost. In the viewpoint, the MPAA exists only to make something expensive something which should be, by all rights, free. I wish such people were right; unfortunatly, currentl technology does not allow such content to be made for free.
Anyway, enough of my anti-piracy rant. There are a lot of things which are legitimate content which such a huge hard disk creates. A mirror of all of the music at mp3.com and any other musician giving away their music is a start. And, of course, a mirror of all free software ever made.
- Sam
[1] A "good multitrack studio" is defined as 16 or more tracks. The first revolution was the Fostex B-16, which came out in 1983 or 1984, and allowed 16-track recording to cost under $20,000 for the full studio (multitrack, mixer, microphones, instruments, outboard FX). The second revolution was the Alesis ADAT, from 1992, which allowed a 16-track studio which wasn't hissy as all get out to be available for under $15,000 or so. The third revolution is affordable computer-based multitracking; one can, these days, get a 16-track stand-along unit (which is a full studio, just add mics and instruments) for about $1000, or get multitracking software a good good sound card for a similiar price point.
Coil on top of oven: Round peices of metal mounted on top of a largish object in the kitchen, wich purpose is to heat kettles and such (like heating water).
We call those things stoves. For example, "Please take the tea kettle off of the stove", or "The sauce pan is on the stove. "Stove" really has two meanings; "stove" is both the box with has the (almost always) four stoves on top, and each "stove" is an individual circular thing which heats up kettles, pots, and pans.
We have two kinds of stoves; gas stoves (which everyone I knows prefers) and electric stoves. Electric stoves scare me; it is too easy to burn pots and burn your finger on one of those.
The oven is a square box which we cook or roast food in. There are "convential ovens"; those are the ovens which use heat (via the "heating coil" which I was discussing before) to cook food. Then there are "microwave ovens" which use microwave radiation to more quickly heat up food. We call the process of using a microwave to heat food, informally, "to nuke" food. The "to nuke" slang may not be universal among English-speakers; it is informal language here in California.
What else about cooking food? A pot is a tall bowl-shaped object with a handle used for cooking things with a lot of water, such as soup; a pan is a short bowl-shaped object used for cooking things which are more solid, such as frying chicken.
Perhaps I should go in to refrigerators (used foor keeping food cool, but above the freezing point of water), freezers (used for keeping food colder than the freeing point for water), and iceboxes (regional language for either a refrigerator or freezer), or 'fridge (shortened form of refrigerator).
I am not surprised that you are not familiar with this terminology; most literature does not discuss this kind of thing.
I was refering to the the plates(?) on top of ovens (no idea what they are called in english)
Here in the US, we call those things heating coils. Keep in mind that almost every single oven I have seen in the US is an electric oven; to heat up the oven we run a good deal of electric current through the heating coil to make it red-hot.
The heating coil is, of course, inside the oven. We usually only heat up the coil in the bottom of the oven unless we are broiling something; then we heat up the coil which is in the top of the oven.
If you use a plate (you know, a large sheet of metal, not the dish one eats off of) to heat things up in ovens over there, I guess we would call such a thing a heating plate.
Well, the way I see it, it could have been done. Wes would be a time traveler, using his Traveler-given powers to travel back in time to the USS Exeter.
Hmmm...speaking of which, I wonder if fandom will make the cut scenes with Wes' "wife" canon. If not, then exaplaining why Wes was at the wedding reception is much simpler (he travelled from whatever mythic space-time to be at his old friend's wedding reception).
I will second Twirlup here, if only because the mplayer crowd is nortorious for flaming people who ask for help. If I have a problem compiling mplayer, and report it to the mailing list, I am sure I would be flamed.
This is why QuickTime makes sense: No twit who will flame me asking me for help.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect both formats to go over like a led zepplin. When audio professionals are arguing about whether these formats sound significantly better, and when people are perfectly happy with inferior-sounding mp3s, I do not think the public wants a better sounding format.
I think the public wants better music and lower prices. Personally, I want the little guy to become more important; I am sick of a hierarchy which makes a very few famous musicians Gods and the rest peons.
I really think the record companies lost it when the internet boom happened. Their reaction to piracy by strong-arm tactics with legislators backfired. While this worked in the early 1990s with the HRRA, when the media controlled the communication channels, such techniques do not fly when communication channels are open.
I think people will continue to enjoy music in large numbers; I currently am enjoying a Mexican group called Kabah. I just do not think the current distribution model makes as much sense any more.
Let me restate that I think pirating mp3s is wrong; it is immoral to download a song without the copyright owner's permission.
- Sam
What happened at that point is that the code base was abandoned, which allowed the Mozilla project to start in earnest. Of course, completely rewriting Netscape with a new license is not a trivial task. People were bemoaning Mozilla for taking so long to write their code as IE became the dominant browser.
What people do not realize is that free software devlopment takes time; people often times aren't getting paid to do the work and there is a strong attitude it is better to do it right slowly than to do it wrong quickly. As long as the software project is not abadoned, the software will eventually have a 1.0 release. It took Mozilla about four years to come out with a 1.0 release; this is remarkably fast in the free software world. As just one comparison, the GNU project was started in 1983; there was not a usable Unix system using 100% free software until about 1992 or so. Technically, the GNU project is still not complete after 20 years.
- Sam
In fact, the college I go to uses, for its on-line registration, such a site; this site refuses to allow me to sign on for on-line classes in Mozilla. However, Konqueror can render the page well enough so that I don't have to get on the phone to add classes or view my schedule.
As an aside, the team which designed the web page were very incompetent (to give credit where credit is due, Unisys was one of the companies doing the contracting; other parties responsible for this fiasco will not be named because no one else responsible has attacked the free software movement). These same people also destroyed the computer database of students who were to receive financial aid when transferring it to the new system, forcing each and every student who wanted finanacial aid to completely resubmit any and all paperwork.
- Sam
Nope. Look at my other recent comments for this article. Two out of three unpaid recursive DNS server implentors agree: DNS is a monster.
The third one may or may not hate DNS; I have just shot him an email seeing whether DNS gets a rotten tomatoes score of 33% or 0%.
Note for the trolls: People who judge DNS without having written their own recursive DNS server are like people who judge a movie based on its preview. Asking a BIND developer what they think of DNS is like asking a certain director what they think of Star Trek V.
- Sam
My gut instinct is that Slashdot stores comments to articles in such a way that sorting artcles based on activity is non-trivial. Personally, I prefer the scoop engine, which has less editor control and more encourages people to post to older artcles.
- Sam
I, on the other hand, was bored enough to read this article here a few days back. Perhaps I should aspire to have a life the way you seem to.
While I have you attention, I wish there was some way to encourage people to post smart things to older articles. There was an article about DNS a day ago; alas, I did not have time when the article was posted to post anything more than a single rant; I now have finally gotten enough time together to write a number of actually useful postings; which, because of my timing, will not get read.
This is what I prefer about Usenet; if someone has something worth saying, but it takes them a week to say it, what they say will have an audience. Slashdot, on the other hand, has a 1-2 hour time frame for someone to post an comment on a given topic before it goes off the front page.
- Sam
This, as it turns out, is not the most ideal way of purging records from the cache. It will really slow things down when you cache starts to fill up and need to prune records from the database. Or slow things down when putting new records in the cache, depending on the implementation details.
You are making the same kind of mistake the original DNS designers made: You have come up with a clever idea which sounds good on the back of a napkin, but has some fairly serious issues when actually implemented.
The problems this idea has is left as an exercise to the reader.
In the real world, it makes more sense to have a list of records in our cache. Every time a record is added to the cache, it is put at the top of the list. Every time a record is accessed from the cache, the record is placed at the top of said list. When the cache starts filling up, we erase records from the bottom of the cache.
There is no need to make a distinction between expired and un-expired records (if we actually implement the parent post's idea); if an expired record is being accessed on a regular basis, it is probably a really bad idea to erase said record from the cache.
- Sam
Hmmm, pretty new to DNS, I see. Trust me, the original DNS spec makes it trivial to poison caches; BIND, until about five years ago, allowed anyone on the internet with a domain to put any record they wanted to in your DNS cache.
DNS is, for the uninitiated, far worse than anyting you can possibly imagine. More information
- Sam
Then, if the DNS server is unable to get a reply from any of the DNS servers in the active cache, it looks for an expired version of the same record, giving that to the end user. Since expired records are not accessed that often, they will usually get cleaned out when our list of allocated records fill up and we throw away records which have not been recently accessed.
OK, this would take a week for me to do for MaraDNS. I have actually been thinking of something myself; you are lucky that you caught me at one of the rare periods when I am actually adding features to MaraDNS.
BTW, MaraDNS can already set the maximum number of records in the cache, and the minimum TTL for records. But, as the idiots replying to you pointed out, setting a minimum TTL of one year is probably not a good idea. A minimum TTL of one day, however, may actually make sense.
- Sam
I have single-handendly written a working recursive DNS server without getting paid for my work. There is a reason why there are only three of us in the entire world; DNS is that bad. Actually, it is a good deal worse than you can imagine.
Let me put it this way. Writing a DNS client (or a non-recursive DNS server) is sort of like Highlander I. Entertaining, really. You think to youself "Hey! That was easy! A recursive server can't be too bad!"
Well, writing a working recursive DNS server is like watching Highlander II. Suddenly, just as Highlander II changes your outlook on the entire Highlander franchise, writing a recursive DNS server changes your outlook on the entire DNS protocol.
But, hey, don't take my word for it. Dan, one of the other three of us, feels the same way. Thomas, the last of us, has made no statements either for or against DNS. If we were to review recursive DNS the same way Rotten Tomatoes reviews movies, DNS would get a 0%; possibly a 33% if Thomas secretly loves DNS and hasn't told anyone. By any standard, that makes for a bomb that should have tanked at the box office.
Alas, it didn't. And so we are stuck with a horrible mess of a protocol today.
- Sam
Your punishment is very simple: You are to write a functioning recursive DNS server. This server has to resolve domains well enough to give an end-user a satisfactory web surfing experience.
After doing this, you will then post an essay to Slashdot concerning your opinion of the DNS spec and well-designed it is.
You will, I assure you, have an experience akin to seeing the movie Highlander II. You hopes for DNS being a decent protocol will become, rather quickly, a big dissapointment. But don't take my word for it. Don't take Dan Bernstein's word for it. Do it yourself and become an exclusive member of the club of People Crazy Enough to Actually Write a Recursive DNS Server. After all, we all know that people who log in as anonymous cowards and flame free software developers are the best programmers that the world has; I am sure you can do this in a week. Once you do this, you too will know why a number of DNS server projects die around the point when the potential DNS implementor in question looks at how recursive resolution is actually done.
If you continue to flame free software developers after doing this, your punishment will be escalated to having to write a recursive DNS server which recursively resolves names according to RFC 1034, while not having any security problems.
If you persist in your flaming ways after doing that, your next punsihment will be to write a C++ compiler which implements everything in the C++ spec, and release said compiler under the GPL.
And, if you continue to insist on flaming free software devlopers after that...well, you won't be, by this point. You'll be too busily getting flamed by anonymous cowards on Slashdot to do any flaming yourself.
- Sam
Now, I find it ironic that Linux is more of a threat to people who have helped the free software movement than it is for people who have not.
Well, unless you count the fact that I wrote open source software living off of the savings I earned after working as a contracter for Microsoft for three months.
- Sam
Now, I myself bought a few Loki games, even ones which do not run on my present computer (ugh, no 3d acceleration): Heretic II, Quake III, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Railroad Tycoon, and Alpha Centauri.
However, I think many people, even people who use Linux, do not understand that with freedom comes responsibility. Such people have a Windows partition on their own computer; do not develop libre software nor contribute to Linux in any other meaningful way. These people are not willing to make real sacrifices to have a libre system, and will not wait six months and pay a little more for the privledge of not having to dual-boot. In fact, such freeloaders often times pirate video games instead of paying for them, so they don't help the development of games for Windows either.
- Sam
The question is: Who is going to develop such a protocol? I have heard a lot of mumbling for a DNS replacment; I have seen little actual action done to make such a replacment. If such a protocol gets developed, I most assurably will be one of the first to implement.
What real solutions do people have to the fragile root servers issue (these days, the fragile .com servers issue).
- Sam
Ahem! (clears throat)
There is a very clear difference between human-readable instructions and computer-readable instructions. Kazaa is object code which is only designed to be read by a computer; your joint-making instructions are designed to be read by a human.
In fact, there is some precedent that the source code of a program can be legally protected free speech. However, once the program is compiled, and the source code is no longer available, it is no longer speech, and is now a device, akin to a machine.
So, yes, your argument can hold water if you were only talking about source code; compiled object code is a different kettle of fish.
- Sam
OK, you just admitted that you use this software for downloading pirated content. Now, the judge knows very well that people do not use file sharing programs to share pictures of their Aunt Tillie with people on the internet; people use the file sharing program, by and large, to share pirated content. In fact, the euphemism "File sharing" for piracy has been around at least since the early 1990s (e.g.: FSP).
The fact of the matter is that, while people could use Kazaa for downloading only Linux distributions, nobody does; as an aside, if the content is legal (such as linux distributions), there seems to be no lack of FTP and WWW servers which have the content in question.
Another thing: The word "piracy" for copyright violation has been a part of the English language since before the early 1980s. Enough people have used it in this sense for the word to be in dictionaries; please don't try to undefine a word just because it gives an ugly name to something a lot of Slashdot user do.
I really don't know when Slashdot stopped being targetted to free software users, and started being targetted to people who are internet media pirates.
- Sam
You get a mess that is very difficult to legally handle. In fact, the FSF is very adamant about all contributions to FSF code having their copyright signed over to the FSF. They feel that the number of copyright holders of the Linux kernel will make any GPL violation court case with the Linux kernel harder to win.
- Sam
- Sam
My question is this: How will people get paid to make songs, TV shows and movies?
I will give you this much: With current technology, we can feasibly have talented musicians come up with business models which allow them to give their music away; multitracking and samplers allows one talented musician to record all of the parts of a song; computer technology makes a good multitrack studio cost about $1000 these days, as opposed to the approximate $10,000 cost ten years ago, and the $100,000 cost 25 years ago [1]. So, for people who enjoy the kind of music a single musician working hard can record in their basement, there will probably be enough such musicians giving away their music to make enjoying music for free feasible.
In fact, I have found a lot of really good music on mp3.com. The main problem is separating the wheat from the chaff; then again, I don't like most music the radios play.
This does not address the issue of making TV Shows and Movies. To make a TV show or movie, one needs actors, sets, filimg crews, and sound crews. It may be possible, in the future, to have programs which use a computer to simulate acors, sets, etc. via computer models. It will only be possible to make affoordible video content when we have this kind of technological leap.
What a lot of people on Slashdot seem to be incapable of understanding is that it costs real money to make compelling audio-video content. They think that movies magically appear out of thin air, and at zero cost. In the viewpoint, the MPAA exists only to make something expensive something which should be, by all rights, free. I wish such people were right; unfortunatly, currentl technology does not allow such content to be made for free.
Anyway, enough of my anti-piracy rant. There are a lot of things which are legitimate content which such a huge hard disk creates. A mirror of all of the music at mp3.com and any other musician giving away their music is a start. And, of course, a mirror of all free software ever made.
- Sam
[1] A "good multitrack studio" is defined as 16 or more tracks. The first revolution was the Fostex B-16, which came out in 1983 or 1984, and allowed 16-track recording to cost under $20,000 for the full studio (multitrack, mixer, microphones, instruments, outboard FX). The second revolution was the Alesis ADAT, from 1992, which allowed a 16-track studio which wasn't hissy as all get out to be available for under $15,000 or so. The third revolution is affordable computer-based multitracking; one can, these days, get a 16-track stand-along unit (which is a full studio, just add mics and instruments) for about $1000, or get multitracking software a good good sound card for a similiar price point.
This is how the laser printer works; for someone who is printing that quantity of pages, it probably is worth $300-$500 more to get a decent printer.
Of course, a color printer without insane markups on the cartridges costs even more.
- Sam
We call those things stoves. For example, "Please take the tea kettle off of the stove", or "The sauce pan is on the stove. "Stove" really has two meanings; "stove" is both the box with has the (almost always) four stoves on top, and each "stove" is an individual circular thing which heats up kettles, pots, and pans.
We have two kinds of stoves; gas stoves (which everyone I knows prefers) and electric stoves. Electric stoves scare me; it is too easy to burn pots and burn your finger on one of those.
The oven is a square box which we cook or roast food in. There are "convential ovens"; those are the ovens which use heat (via the "heating coil" which I was discussing before) to cook food. Then there are "microwave ovens" which use microwave radiation to more quickly heat up food. We call the process of using a microwave to heat food, informally, "to nuke" food. The "to nuke" slang may not be universal among English-speakers; it is informal language here in California.
What else about cooking food? A pot is a tall bowl-shaped object with a handle used for cooking things with a lot of water, such as soup; a pan is a short bowl-shaped object used for cooking things which are more solid, such as frying chicken.
Perhaps I should go in to refrigerators (used foor keeping food cool, but above the freezing point of water), freezers (used for keeping food colder than the freeing point for water), and iceboxes (regional language for either a refrigerator or freezer), or 'fridge (shortened form of refrigerator).
I am not surprised that you are not familiar with this terminology; most literature does not discuss this kind of thing.
- Sam
Here in the US, we call those things heating coils. Keep in mind that almost every single oven I have seen in the US is an electric oven; to heat up the oven we run a good deal of electric current through the heating coil to make it red-hot.
The heating coil is, of course, inside the oven. We usually only heat up the coil in the bottom of the oven unless we are broiling something; then we heat up the coil which is in the top of the oven.
If you use a plate (you know, a large sheet of metal, not the dish one eats off of) to heat things up in ovens over there, I guess we would call such a thing a heating plate.
- Sam
Hmmm...speaking of which, I wonder if fandom will make the cut scenes with Wes' "wife" canon. If not, then exaplaining why Wes was at the wedding reception is much simpler (he travelled from whatever mythic space-time to be at his old friend's wedding reception).
- Sam
This is why QuickTime makes sense: No twit who will flame me asking me for help.
- Sam
I meant to say "With all due respect for Craig"
- Sam