Until the first virus that figures out how to write to your verification settings, after which point 80% of everyone (those who don't use the patch to fix it) will end up accepting every other virus made.
Honestly I see it as a really drawn out and convoluted (and probably slow) way to enforce sandboxes, other OS's have no problem doing it with plain old x86 hardware, I don't understand why MS is having such trouble.
"My cat and her daughter, both completely unfamiliar with litter boxes, are looking to replace a broken backyard with something new. They'd like to either spend as few dollars as possible on a litter box, or replace the backyard. Silly me, I mentioned I had a spare box around. It's a Digital Equipment 'Tape Drive Carrier' 20inches with 17inches, and onboard folding of an unknown type. As this thing is going to be used for litter boxing, I need an cat litter that will work with my newly dusted-off CatLogic Z11 litter box cleaner. So what are my options? Will Tidy Cats handle the limited folding and cleaner? Is there a WYSIWYG solution for poopsiecat? Is there a chance in hell any distribution can give me entrophy? I've got a whopping three inch height in there. What can I do with it?"
I firmly believe that we know nothing about the conditions about evolution, and any conjecture at present is either egotistical bullshit, or reactionary statments to said bullshit.
Honestly, it annoys me when people try and disprove/prove the existance of aliens, until we develop superluminal flight, it is a pointless discussion.
Taking a couple years and just spending them on the kids-- no problem
Actually I would recomend against doing *nothing* but caring for the kids. Be sure to do some community service or volunteer work that will count as "experience" to a future employer. My father did this for 10 years after my brother and I were born, he spent almost 5 years after reentering the workplace to get a reasonable job, and the first 2 years were actually as a telemarketer because he couldn't find a better job.
If nothing else, offer to be a jr. coder for a larger non-profit group (volunteer). Explain your situation clearly, and say that your family currently comes first in your life. You will find in the long run it's far more productive to volunteer 15hr/week (or whatever) than to play catch up in a few years.
It was a jump to conclusions mat. See, one would stand at one end, and there would be conclusions writen all over it. You would then jump, and land on a conclusion. Get it?
Thats what I'd do if I didn't have to worry about money.
the dpi of your monitor is probably effectivly 96, but suppose someone has a 600dpi monitor (damn that would be expensive..). When your GUI "set up" the monitor, it would compile the cursors into a bitmap for the apropriate dpi.
The video card would still get fed a bitmap yes, but it would only require one cursor for all future screens (think ttf fonts)
To be honest I've never used a p2p network for stealing IP. But I would use a network with millions of songs avadiable for download @ a nominal (1-2$ per).
Most CD's today don't even need a real studio to get the shit edit/sampling job they do. They need one editor, a hi-fi sound system in thier computer, and a few hours per song. Total cost ~1k per song. Advertisment is a joke, basically the CD's are adverts for the concerts, and the form of a CD provides nothing to me except a reliable distribution/replay media.
Remove the CD and I'm now paying ~1k for the editing, a few K (10?) for the required MBA's/marketers (they would spend at most 2 weeks on a song, except one MBA who would be like an "agent" in holywood is to actors; pop hits would be diffrent, but this isn't a discussion of pop hits), and the salaries of the artists (2-6k+ per member per song, but dependant on sales [assume people would continue to release ~10 songs per year]). Throw in 20k for inital distribution of a new song(internet and radio) (more for the first song a label released).
Now, songs that you hear constantly on your local "radio" station obviously have more costs, but they are going to make more money. In fact I'd venture to guess if it only cost a dollar or two and a bit of afk time to get them, they would make significantly more money.
I see no need in this total cost of $41,000 to be shelling out 17$ per disk for 5 songs I like. Assuming a fan would buy on average 5 songs per 10, they would only need to maintain a fanbase of 82,000 in order to be breaking even @ $1/song. Sam Goodie could then move into the buisness of distributing "pristine" mixes, that they press themselves. The song producers themselves have no need to be doing that, they are in the buisness of making music. Everyones happy, and I'd probably end up spending more on music than I do now.
While the current form of P2P is absurd to the extreme. I see a definate shift in how music is made over the next decade or two, slowly consumers will realize that there is no need to force the initial distribution through a heavy/large/expensive physical medium, and recording studios will slim down.
Intrestingly enough I'm a geek and I've never once touched a p2p network (except once at a friends house for pr0n, but thats diffrent).
I think a vast majority of "geeks" are really highschool loosers.
Then there is the set, I kid you not, who try and convince me "Stealing Music/Movies/Whatever, because it's too hard for the average person to do so". When I ask if it's ok to steal a computer from BestBuy, they invariable state "No". When I point out the average person is incapable of doing that, whats the diffrence, they generally get all red in the face.
If you take something from me without my permission, and against my will, then you are a thief, pure and simple.
Well, lets go back 3000 years.
You invent a song, I copy your song. You loose what?
Lets move to now.
You invent a song, I copy your song. You loose what?
I'd like to say I'm in all situations against the menance that is p2p, but here I had to point out the obvious flaw in your argument. Just because we have created artifical scarcity around certain goods, does not mean that those goods are actually scarce.
Whats really interesting, you can actually delete all the files associated with IE, clean up the registry slightly, and Win98 works perfectly fine.
It just hard crashes every time it tries to make a call to MSIE, which happens as far as I can tell only when one tries to view a webpage. Neither file explorer is broken, and the desktop works just fine. All programs in the control pannel work great, and all of MS's other apps are able to function fine.
I always found it odd that the only thing making it "integrated" to the OS was the fact that they don't check to see if MSIE exists before they try to call into it.
Therefore thier claim to the fact it's "integrated" to the os soley lies on the fact that "It's always been there, therefore third party developers might have taken it for granted". This is a prety weak argument if you ask me, and I have trouble believing that third party developers can't easily interface a gecko object if it's set to the default/MSIE fails to be in existance.
That or 17 year olds who know trivial scripts in visual basic (at intro to pascal level understanding basically) aern't capable of writing a virus that almost brings down the internet on a mac.
Even if macs had 97% marketshare I would have trouble believing this was the case.
And your point "documented flaws". I'm sorry, but you trust a system with well documented security flaws? It seems to me this would be a major reason to start thinking of switching.
Just to point out MSIE has been publicly vunerable for over 3 weeks now. Lets not even mention how long it's been avadiable to the real black hats. This is the most significant security flaw of the century so far, and it's still not fixed. Quite interesting eh?
Therefore, my inclination is to believe OS X is actually more stable than Linux.
Of course we are talking 60+ days uptime before we could even begin to think about a kernel panic, if your hardware is not shit, so it's fairly unimportant for most users.
I was giving my reasons for using OSX over OS9. I've already got Linux on a couple other boxes. Linux on the desktop sucks ass, and if you disagree, you're probably not a Mac user. It's better than win32, but that's because win32 sucks worse.
haha so true.. I've recently started wondered why I found 4 hours of compiling/tweaking just to get a functional *BSD box was considered acceptable to me. Not that I'm dissing FreeBSD or anything (in fact I can hardly stand any other x86 OS currently, though I have not tried os/2), it's just that 4 hours just to get a new setup functional is a tad bit extreme. Then I think about what it takes to install windows on a clean box and realize it'd be 4 hours just to get to the equivalent of FreeBSD's first boot (all hardware except sound detected and working correctly, just have programs to install and config left).
I'm seriously considering ebaying my current laptop and getting a mid-level mac laptop that can run osX to replace it. Does anyone think that would be wise? (My current setup is prety much the definition of a perfect kde3 desktop)
anyway enough rambling, time to actually get some work done!
I think it appeals to the type of person who loves details. And he describes every scene in such amazingly vivid detail that I rarely find people I pictured a sceen vastly diffrent than.
Some peoples minds seem to be inclined to be absurdly precise, and Tolkien caters to this mindset. Apparently, there are other people who don't apreciate this, which is fine.
His inability to discern between that which is important and that which is a triviality is very distressing.
Thats actually what I like the most. I tire sometimes of reading only the "important" and "story moving" parts, Tolkien provides an entire believable portion of history, from the context of the year in the life of some hobbits. A truly amazing task, and it fills me with awe that he can have such a succulent imagination to describe an entire world to the point that it's almost real.
In about 50 years we will start running out of oil unless we find a new "hotspot", so it's not something I worry to much about. It'll be very hard to try and push everything one way or another while a solution [oil] is currently economically viable, just not optimial, but requires no research to use at this moment. As soon as our suply becomes less than our demand, the tech will instantly shift to new forms of energy.
I have a sad sad feeling the current era will be known as the "oil age" to future historians.
just ignore the sentance "If the goverment set absurd tarrifs, or required " in my close. I apparently went back to check something and lost my train of thought. Sorry.
COMMENTARY--No other market is quite like software. General Motors isn't forced to contend with a "free car" movement, which has a goal of undermining sales-based automakers... Of course, software is unique as its production relies purely on the mind.
I can think of several offhand, the first being the literature industry. The second being the music industry. There are numerable industies in our world that exist soley to produce IP and nothing else. All of these industries have "Open Source" movements of thier own, but none of them benifit from the internet nearly as much as OSS does. What makes OSS so important is the fact it was developed in a time when worldwide data communication suddenly became free and instant, coming from 7 day snail mail for 32c thats a huge improvment.
The thing that really differentiates the software industry from other IP products, is that software can be developed in a team. I would hate to read a novel writen by a rag tag team of developers, or a song with the music and voice tracks writen by two random contributors who had never met eachother before. It dosen't work nearly as well as software for obvious reasons.
Free software, however, is only a problem if you hope to sell software.
Replace software with comodity software, as he explains later on. And as I will explain later "free software" for the goverment is perfectly possible using existing "proprietary" software.
Free certainly doesn't cause complaints among consumers, although it might lead to fewer choices due to fewer competitors entering the market (profits attract competition).
It might also lead to world peace (sharing data is a form of altrusim). Absurd arguments don't get you very far here...
Retailers such as Wal-Mart can benefit if consumers flock to products made cheaper through the use of open source software.
Yes they can, and if it gets the job done for the consumer then all is good. It seems he agrees with me here.
Even developers can benefit, as there is ample room for custom software, which fills the gap between general-purpose open source product and tailored software designed for a particular business (often of the proprietary sort which generates revenue as long as it doesn't grow big enough to attract the attention of free software developers).
Where exactly are the software developers helped by being forced to work in a non-mainstream field? I'm sorry but this paragraph flatly contradicted itself in it's hypothesis and argument.
These good things, however, in no way justify forcing people to use open source products.
Are we positive that this is an exaustive list? In fact I don't believe the reason for this bill has even been brought up yet.. While the reasons cited so far might not be enough reason, I am almost positive there is just cause for a "Free Software" (a la Peru) bill. I will admit though, I am no more the political scientist of economist than the next guy, and I cannot reliably predict all the effects of such a bill.
I have no problem with companies that choose to use open-source software. I also have no problem with governments that choose it.
Good, because it would be ineffective and absurd to claim you have a problem with the use of public IP. As if the existance of public IP that was just as good as commercial IP should flatly be ignored just because it public.
I have a very big problem with groups that try to force governments to favor open source software exclusively.
If you define OSS software as software that follows the pillars stated below:
Reveals source to check for backdoors to the goverment
Promises to never force the goverment to buy another product from them with no alternatives. Would it be acceptable if a road contractor set up a road that could only be worked on by themselves, without completly removing it and re-engineering everything from the ground up if they switched contractors?
Adheres to open standards, so that the goverment can easily write an interface to the data created from your product should they ever need to.
What exacly could the agument against OSS sofware if you define it so. This is what I would expect from any tax funded agency when there is such an alternative. In the select few situations where there is no OSS solution, it would make sense to grant a special case and allow the purchase of said software. Other than those two cases, what argument is there? I cannot see one, and I would love to be enlightened.
Mandating that governments only procure open source software would be a form of government protection, allowing open source to avoid competition from proprietary alternatives.
When proprietary alternatives don't fit the pillars of OSS I laid out previously, it is inapropriate for the goverment to use it. I am willing to debate this point further, but I believe it is obvious that a goverments responsibility is to have open reliable data formats. Proprietary software is capable of fulfilling my OSS pillars above, in fact microsoft is capable of changing very little in thier UELA, and giving the gvt a NDA to sign, and windows would fit inside the OSS pillars stated above.
When the Anti-OSS example, Windows, is capable to fit under the goverment mandated pillars of OSS, is it really the goverments fault to require that microsoft provide them with the features they require? I would love to be able to walk into consulting interviews and say "I know these were your requirments, but honestly I don't like them, I want to keep all IP I develop for you, sorry". That dosen't seem like a very good way to win a contract to me.
The irony is rich indeed when proponents of open source decry on one hand a "monopoly" whose dominance is built entirely on consumer choice, and on the other promote a government-protected one of the sort Adam Smith explicitly warned against.
The goverment is required to set fair limitations on who it will give money to. In order to maintain state security, and provide the required open and reliable data formats to the public, the OSS pillars I have dictated earlier are apropriate limitations in the field of software. I'm not sure exacly which Adam Smith argument you are pushing, but I would love to counter if if you would be so bold as to extend it fully. It is perhaps true that some OSS proponents wish a state mandated OSS monopoly, but that is far from the standard case. This is really a straw man though, because OSS is a philosophy, and I'm sure I can find a contradiction between two believers of any philosophy. Incase someone took down that you pushed that this state contract OSS initiative was in any way a effort to counter certain monopolies, it's not. The state should require the pillars of OSS stated above in order to perform it's basic functions to the citizen body.
I think Tim O'Reilly put it best when he said, in a recent weblog: "...any victory for open source achieved through deprivation of the user's right to choose would indeed be a betrayal of the principles that free software and open source have stood for."
This is clearly out of scope. Tim O'Reilly is refering to the users right to choose between several products. This debate is over the goverment mandating the pillars of OSS in the name of security, data reliablity, and open data formats; What this argument is not about is the pillars of OSS as they apply to consumers and buisnesses. Quoting Adam Smith, I'm sure your well aware that the state and private insititutions must uphold entirely diffrent values.
Some say that the "Digital Software Security Act," as the California proposal is disingenuously called, isn't true protection. Proprietary companies just have to open their source code in order to compete for government contracts.[irony implied]
As I have stated many times, the goverment is setting standards over what it should require from software. It's the software providers responsibility to apease the goverment, not the other way around. You really make no counter argument here, you just claim this is not so. To counter I say that it is so.
Well, America just has to stop growing GM (Genetically Modified) food to gain access to European markets, even though all scientific evidence indicates that GM food is not harmful.
This is true, they do. Whats your point? I can cite the reasons to disalow GM food, but that is completly and totally beyond the scope of this dicussions.
E-Commerce sites in the US just have to adhere to European VAT rules to be allowed to sell to Europeans.
Yes they do. Again, this is totally offbase and provides nothing to the dicussion. It is not a support to the above point, because your above point was not a point.
Europeans just have to buy struggling American steel companies to avoid getting hit by George W's recent steel tariffs.
I'm not seeing how a european owned steel company exporting goods to europe is going to have any less tarrifs, but I have not followed this. Again straw man.
In other words, the fact that companies can alter their business structure in order to get around a "non-trade" barrier doesn't make it any less of a trade barrier.
No you have argued that tarrifs and trade regulations effect free trade. You have not shown in any way that regulations on goverment awarded contracts are a harm to free trade. Again straw man, and out of scope.
There are a number of important reasons why proprietary software companies might not want to open their source code, chief among them that revenue models based around the sale of an open source product aren't exactly known for their profits.
Is this support for your point with the [irony] in it? If so it is not the goverments responsibility to allow all bidders to bid, it is the goverments responsibility to uphold the ideas of security (no back doors), reliability of data, and open data formats for citizen audits. The goverment has no other responsibility in this situation that we have discussed so far, and I would love to see you try and counter this.
The trade barrier, in this case, operates through the fact that most companies currently making proprietary software would sooner replace their executive team with orangutans than discard a revenue model with a proven track record.
They don't have to discard that revenue model, they just have to provide the goverment full source under NDA. This argument is leaning towards absurditiy, but is still valid. Unfortunatly there is no trade barier. The goverment has no responsibility to break from its requirments simply to stimulate trade under a particular philosophy. It is unforunate that people have come to associate OSS always with FSF, because OSS in this situation is simply the following of the three pillars I laied out earlier.
Of course, who says anyone should care about the plight of proprietary software companies? Open source code is free, and that's a good thing as stated at the beginning of this article. Why shouldn't government get the most bang for its buck from our tax dollars?
The cost of a product in tax dollars pales in comparison to the requirment of the goverment to avoid backdoors and provide it's citizens with open formated data. The goverment should be worried about functionality and responsibility before cost when the cost increase is not absurd.
If you accept that argument, however, you are trapped in a logical conundrum. If you truly believe that government should get the most bang for its buck, then you must reject a policy that would prevent the government from doing a proper cost-benefit analysis to determine what, truly, provides the most bang for the buck.
Your mythical "Bang for the Buck" is again of no consequence in this discussion. The goverment has a responsibility to the voting public to uphold the three pillars of OSS stated above, and cost is secondary to them by far.
As I mentioned in a past article, good ideas aren't the exclusive domain of open source programmers. What if a particular government agency would benefit the most from standardizing on Oracle databases? Perhaps its personnel are trained on Oracle, or Oracle developers are easier to find than MySQL developers. Perhaps Oracle works better with existing systems, or other products in the marketplace. Perhaps there are more development tools available, or more add-on software that the agency finds useful. Perhaps, horror of horrors, Oracle is just BETTER than the open source alternative, at least with respect to the features that matter to the agency in question.
Then if they can provide the citizens with open formated data, and the system is proven not to have a back door, it is apropriate for special situations to get grants to non OSS software. In almost no situation is it not worth investigating the alternatives though. Also since oracle can simply provide the code to a single agency under NDA, it is absurd that oracle would fail to fall under the pillars of OSS stated above if they really want the contract.
All that MIGHT just add up to making Oracle worth the money some government agency spends on it.
It very well might, again that is of no consequence to the fact they are giving up the ability to protect themselves from rogue corperations, or meer employees of said corperations. And if they fail at all three pillars of OSS, they also would not provide a reliable data solution to the taxpayers, nor would they allow the citizens to keep the goverment in check. This raises the bar on goverment data from literacy to reverse engineering training, a huge jump for any organization to take lightly.
A policy that mandates that government not be allowed to make that calculation is a policy that will result in less efficient usage of tax dollars, as government is forced to favor an open source option even if, in the aggregate, a proprietary solution was more cost effective.
Again, as I have countered above, being cost effective is not the end all when it comes to goverment. Goverements are required to adhere to the values stated many times by me now, not just save cash getting the quickest solution.
Over time, things can only get worse. Protectionism impoverishes a country, which is why nations around the world are busy opening their markets to foreign competition. What applies at the macroeconomic level applies at the microeconomic level. Protectionism won't help the progress of open source any more than it boosts the efficiency of protected industries in Chile (or steel companies in the United States).
I believe we have concluded that the goverment setting requirments on software, that it buys, which are in the interest of the democratic public, is not protectionism any more than requiring certain specs when getting roads done is.
Open source is supposed to be about freedom.
Said who, what, where, why, when, how.
Unfortunately, certain advocates have lost sight of that goal.
This has nothing to do with RMS vs. Bill gates, it has everything to do with code auditability, data reliablity, and open formats for data.
People should be free to use software which best fits their needs, whether or not it adheres to a particular programming philosophy.
Key word there is people, isn't it? It tires me how you mix and match peoples interestes and the goverment interest. The goverment has completly diffrent responsibilites than a free citizen, this should be obvious to a Adam Smith scholar of all people.
I suggest that open source proponents spend their time crafting interoperability guidelines rather than creating a protected environment, which artificially boosts open-source adoption while hiding it from the full rigors of competition.
I would state again it's not a protected envirment, but my tounge might fall out. Instead I'll just move on.
The goverment clearly has diffrent responibilities than a citizen, and thus has diffrent requirments. Some of those responsibilities require them to use OSS products, but that does not mean they need to back RMS. Even a product that releases its source under strict NDA is acceptable to the goverment, and it is perfectly valid that the goverment require this. A goverment must use open standards whenever possible, thusly they must audit the code to assure adherence to open standards. The goverment must also assure the ability to read its data in 10 years, the only way to promise this is open standards and non-expiring software, both of which are concepts of the "Goverment OSS" philosphy.
I think it's evident that the goverment upholding its responsibilities to citizens is in no way a protectionist envirment. If the goverment set absurd tarrifs, or required
I would love to hear a reply to this, as I'm sure I missed several points, and probably left myself wide open to some attacks. My email is sfritz@postmaster.co.uk
I counter with the fact that there are BSD licenses. In fact I run an "Open Source" machine on one of my servers, and not one single line of it's origional code came from a GPL license.
To claim that RMS is the definition of OSS implies you either are new to this argument, or are a troll. RMS does believe that all software should be free, he is one pillar of OSS. I on the other hand feel that OSS software should exist for comodity items (OS/Webserver..) and commercial software should provide "custom" or "exotic" functions, if there is a market for those solutions. OSS software should be usable in comercial products, and I feel that a company ought (moral obligation) to provide some kickback or recognition when they do.
To say that RMS is more important because he's writen Emacs and Hurd, where as I've only spit out a few drivers, is absurd. Both of us have opinions of what OSS is.
In this particular case the definition of "Free Software" should fall under the category of software that dosen't give a private company absolute control of your data. In no situation should a goverment be exchanging documents in a format that rely upon a certain non-open standard format for information exchange. This is comparable to a law being passed that contained parts of an IEEE spec, which would require people to buy the right to the spec in order to even read thier own law. Both of these are inapropriate for goverments to do, and should be avoided if possible.
MS is capable of creating "Free Software", and even selling it with thier current UELA if they so choose. They have currently shown a vested interest in not doing so, but that is MS's choice, not the goverments. The fact that alternatives to said software that does not perform for the goverment means the goverment ought to use the alternatives unless non-free software is the only way to perfom a certain task. (runon, but valid?)
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I think my thoughts on this matter can be described with the following quote.
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that".
sanity checking in your input values
basic rule of thumb, don't let people past your nic see anything but html; don't accept anything but stuff that you can *prove* is safe.
Until the first virus that figures out how to write to your verification settings, after which point 80% of everyone (those who don't use the patch to fix it) will end up accepting every other virus made.
Honestly I see it as a really drawn out and convoluted (and probably slow) way to enforce sandboxes, other OS's have no problem doing it with plain old x86 hardware, I don't understand why MS is having such trouble.
Since when was a two page research paper fairly lengthy? Most English Comp 101 classes require 2+ pages on the first assignment...
I'm not sure if this is a sign of the sad state of popular media, or the sad state of all populus.
"My cat and her daughter, both completely unfamiliar with litter boxes, are looking to replace a broken backyard with something new. They'd like to either spend as few dollars as possible on a litter box, or replace the backyard. Silly me, I mentioned I had a spare box around. It's a Digital Equipment 'Tape Drive Carrier' 20inches with 17inches, and onboard folding of an unknown type. As this thing is going to be used for litter boxing, I need an cat litter that will work with my newly dusted-off CatLogic Z11 litter box cleaner. So what are my options? Will Tidy Cats handle the limited folding and cleaner? Is there a WYSIWYG solution for poopsiecat? Is there a chance in hell any distribution can give me entrophy? I've got a whopping three inch height in there. What can I do with it?"
I firmly believe that we know nothing about the conditions about evolution, and any conjecture at present is either egotistical bullshit, or reactionary statments to said bullshit.
Honestly, it annoys me when people try and disprove/prove the existance of aliens, until we develop superluminal flight, it is a pointless discussion.
Taking a couple years and just spending them on the kids-- no problem
Actually I would recomend against doing *nothing* but caring for the kids. Be sure to do some community service or volunteer work that will count as "experience" to a future employer. My father did this for 10 years after my brother and I were born, he spent almost 5 years after reentering the workplace to get a reasonable job, and the first 2 years were actually as a telemarketer because he couldn't find a better job.
If nothing else, offer to be a jr. coder for a larger non-profit group (volunteer). Explain your situation clearly, and say that your family currently comes first in your life. You will find in the long run it's far more productive to volunteer 15hr/week (or whatever) than to play catch up in a few years.
It was a jump to conclusions mat. See, one would stand at one end, and there would be conclusions writen all over it. You would then jump, and land on a conclusion. Get it?
Thats what I'd do if I didn't have to worry about money.
I'll expand his point
the dpi of your monitor is probably effectivly 96, but suppose someone has a 600dpi monitor (damn that would be expensive..). When your GUI "set up" the monitor, it would compile the cursors into a bitmap for the apropriate dpi.
The video card would still get fed a bitmap yes, but it would only require one cursor for all future screens (think ttf fonts)
To be honest I've never used a p2p network for stealing IP. But I would use a network with millions of songs avadiable for download @ a nominal (1-2$ per).
Most CD's today don't even need a real studio to get the shit edit/sampling job they do. They need one editor, a hi-fi sound system in thier computer, and a few hours per song. Total cost ~1k per song. Advertisment is a joke, basically the CD's are adverts for the concerts, and the form of a CD provides nothing to me except a reliable distribution/replay media.
Remove the CD and I'm now paying ~1k for the editing, a few K (10?) for the required MBA's/marketers (they would spend at most 2 weeks on a song, except one MBA who would be like an "agent" in holywood is to actors; pop hits would be diffrent, but this isn't a discussion of pop hits), and the salaries of the artists (2-6k+ per member per song, but dependant on sales [assume people would continue to release ~10 songs per year]). Throw in 20k for inital distribution of a new song(internet and radio) (more for the first song a label released).
Now, songs that you hear constantly on your local "radio" station obviously have more costs, but they are going to make more money. In fact I'd venture to guess if it only cost a dollar or two and a bit of afk time to get them, they would make significantly more money.
I see no need in this total cost of $41,000 to be shelling out 17$ per disk for 5 songs I like. Assuming a fan would buy on average 5 songs per 10, they would only need to maintain a fanbase of 82,000 in order to be breaking even @ $1/song. Sam Goodie could then move into the buisness of distributing "pristine" mixes, that they press themselves. The song producers themselves have no need to be doing that, they are in the buisness of making music. Everyones happy, and I'd probably end up spending more on music than I do now.
While the current form of P2P is absurd to the extreme. I see a definate shift in how music is made over the next decade or two, slowly consumers will realize that there is no need to force the initial distribution through a heavy/large/expensive physical medium, and recording studios will slim down.
Intrestingly enough I'm a geek and I've never once touched a p2p network (except once at a friends house for pr0n, but thats diffrent).
I think a vast majority of "geeks" are really highschool loosers.
Then there is the set, I kid you not, who try and convince me "Stealing Music/Movies/Whatever, because it's too hard for the average person to do so". When I ask if it's ok to steal a computer from BestBuy, they invariable state "No". When I point out the average person is incapable of doing that, whats the diffrence, they generally get all red in the face.
If you take something from me without my permission, and against my will, then you are a thief, pure and simple.
Well, lets go back 3000 years.
You invent a song, I copy your song. You loose what?
Lets move to now.
You invent a song, I copy your song. You loose what?
I'd like to say I'm in all situations against the menance that is p2p, but here I had to point out the obvious flaw in your argument. Just because we have created artifical scarcity around certain goods, does not mean that those goods are actually scarce.
Whats really interesting, you can actually delete all the files associated with IE, clean up the registry slightly, and Win98 works perfectly fine.
It just hard crashes every time it tries to make a call to MSIE, which happens as far as I can tell only when one tries to view a webpage. Neither file explorer is broken, and the desktop works just fine. All programs in the control pannel work great, and all of MS's other apps are able to function fine.
I always found it odd that the only thing making it "integrated" to the OS was the fact that they don't check to see if MSIE exists before they try to call into it.
Therefore thier claim to the fact it's "integrated" to the os soley lies on the fact that "It's always been there, therefore third party developers might have taken it for granted". This is a prety weak argument if you ask me, and I have trouble believing that third party developers can't easily interface a gecko object if it's set to the default/MSIE fails to be in existance.
That or 17 year olds who know trivial scripts in visual basic (at intro to pascal level understanding basically) aern't capable of writing a virus that almost brings down the internet on a mac.
Even if macs had 97% marketshare I would have trouble believing this was the case.
And your point "documented flaws". I'm sorry, but you trust a system with well documented security flaws? It seems to me this would be a major reason to start thinking of switching.
Just to point out MSIE has been publicly vunerable for over 3 weeks now. Lets not even mention how long it's been avadiable to the real black hats. This is the most significant security flaw of the century so far, and it's still not fixed. Quite interesting eh?
I've seen software driven kernel panics in Linux
I have never seen one in FreeBSD
Therefore, my inclination is to believe OS X is actually more stable than Linux.
Of course we are talking 60+ days uptime before we could even begin to think about a kernel panic, if your hardware is not shit, so it's fairly unimportant for most users.
I was giving my reasons for using OSX over OS9. I've already got Linux on a couple other boxes. Linux on the desktop sucks ass, and if you disagree, you're probably not a Mac user. It's better than win32, but that's because win32 sucks worse.
haha so true.. I've recently started wondered why I found 4 hours of compiling/tweaking just to get a functional *BSD box was considered acceptable to me. Not that I'm dissing FreeBSD or anything (in fact I can hardly stand any other x86 OS currently, though I have not tried os/2), it's just that 4 hours just to get a new setup functional is a tad bit extreme. Then I think about what it takes to install windows on a clean box and realize it'd be 4 hours just to get to the equivalent of FreeBSD's first boot (all hardware except sound detected and working correctly, just have programs to install and config left).
I'm seriously considering ebaying my current laptop and getting a mid-level mac laptop that can run osX to replace it. Does anyone think that would be wise? (My current setup is prety much the definition of a perfect kde3 desktop)
anyway enough rambling, time to actually get some work done!
I find the only thing I watch is cspan anymore, I'll be damned if anyones going to tell me I'm worse for it.
Watching MTV might lead to the creation of the next white rapper, but I'm prety sure that watching congressional pannels is safe for the mind.
I think it appeals to the type of person who loves details. And he describes every scene in such amazingly vivid detail that I rarely find people I pictured a sceen vastly diffrent than.
Some peoples minds seem to be inclined to be absurdly precise, and Tolkien caters to this mindset. Apparently, there are other people who don't apreciate this, which is fine.
His inability to discern between that which is important and that which is a triviality is very distressing.
Thats actually what I like the most. I tire sometimes of reading only the "important" and "story moving" parts, Tolkien provides an entire believable portion of history, from the context of the year in the life of some hobbits. A truly amazing task, and it fills me with awe that he can have such a succulent imagination to describe an entire world to the point that it's almost real.
gyroscopic effect, kthxbye~~
In about 50 years we will start running out of oil unless we find a new "hotspot", so it's not something I worry to much about. It'll be very hard to try and push everything one way or another while a solution [oil] is currently economically viable, just not optimial, but requires no research to use at this moment. As soon as our suply becomes less than our demand, the tech will instantly shift to new forms of energy.
I have a sad sad feeling the current era will be known as the "oil age" to future historians.
tag
tag for home
hahahah
just ignore the sentance "If the goverment set absurd tarrifs, or required " in my close. I apparently went back to check something and lost my train of thought. Sorry.
Of course, software is unique as its production relies purely on the mind.
I can think of several offhand, the first being the literature industry. The second being the music industry. There are numerable industies in our world that exist soley to produce IP and nothing else. All of these industries have "Open Source" movements of thier own, but none of them benifit from the internet nearly as much as OSS does. What makes OSS so important is the fact it was developed in a time when worldwide data communication suddenly became free and instant, coming from 7 day snail mail for 32c thats a huge improvment.
The thing that really differentiates the software industry from other IP products, is that software can be developed in a team. I would hate to read a novel writen by a rag tag team of developers, or a song with the music and voice tracks writen by two random contributors who had never met eachother before. It dosen't work nearly as well as software for obvious reasons.
Free software, however, is only a problem if you hope to sell software.
Replace software with comodity software, as he explains later on. And as I will explain later "free software" for the goverment is perfectly possible using existing "proprietary" software.
Free certainly doesn't cause complaints among consumers, although it might lead to fewer choices due to fewer competitors entering the market (profits attract competition).
It might also lead to world peace (sharing data is a form of altrusim). Absurd arguments don't get you very far here...
Retailers such as Wal-Mart can benefit if consumers flock to products made cheaper through the use of open source software.
Yes they can, and if it gets the job done for the consumer then all is good. It seems he agrees with me here.
Even developers can benefit, as there is ample room for custom software, which fills the gap between general-purpose open source product and tailored software designed for a particular business (often of the proprietary sort which generates revenue as long as it doesn't grow big enough to attract the attention of free software developers).
Where exactly are the software developers helped by being forced to work in a non-mainstream field? I'm sorry but this paragraph flatly contradicted itself in it's hypothesis and argument.
These good things, however, in no way justify forcing people to use open source products.
Are we positive that this is an exaustive list? In fact I don't believe the reason for this bill has even been brought up yet.. While the reasons cited so far might not be enough reason, I am almost positive there is just cause for a "Free Software" (a la Peru) bill. I will admit though, I am no more the political scientist of economist than the next guy, and I cannot reliably predict all the effects of such a bill.
I have no problem with companies that choose to use open-source software. I also have no problem with governments that choose it.
Good, because it would be ineffective and absurd to claim you have a problem with the use of public IP. As if the existance of public IP that was just as good as commercial IP should flatly be ignored just because it public.
I have a very big problem with groups that try to force governments to favor open source software exclusively.
If you define OSS software as software that follows the pillars stated below:
What exacly could the agument against OSS sofware if you define it so. This is what I would expect from any tax funded agency when there is such an alternative. In the select few situations where there is no OSS solution, it would make sense to grant a special case and allow the purchase of said software. Other than those two cases, what argument is there? I cannot see one, and I would love to be enlightened.
Mandating that governments only procure open source software would be a form of government protection, allowing open source to avoid competition from proprietary alternatives.
When proprietary alternatives don't fit the pillars of OSS I laid out previously, it is inapropriate for the goverment to use it. I am willing to debate this point further, but I believe it is obvious that a goverments responsibility is to have open reliable data formats. Proprietary software is capable of fulfilling my OSS pillars above, in fact microsoft is capable of changing very little in thier UELA, and giving the gvt a NDA to sign, and windows would fit inside the OSS pillars stated above.
When the Anti-OSS example, Windows, is capable to fit under the goverment mandated pillars of OSS, is it really the goverments fault to require that microsoft provide them with the features they require? I would love to be able to walk into consulting interviews and say "I know these were your requirments, but honestly I don't like them, I want to keep all IP I develop for you, sorry". That dosen't seem like a very good way to win a contract to me.
The irony is rich indeed when proponents of open source decry on one hand a "monopoly" whose dominance is built entirely on consumer choice, and on the other promote a government-protected one of the sort Adam Smith explicitly warned against.
The goverment is required to set fair limitations on who it will give money to. In order to maintain state security, and provide the required open and reliable data formats to the public, the OSS pillars I have dictated earlier are apropriate limitations in the field of software. I'm not sure exacly which Adam Smith argument you are pushing, but I would love to counter if if you would be so bold as to extend it fully. It is perhaps true that some OSS proponents wish a state mandated OSS monopoly, but that is far from the standard case. This is really a straw man though, because OSS is a philosophy, and I'm sure I can find a contradiction between two believers of any philosophy. Incase someone took down that you pushed that this state contract OSS initiative was in any way a effort to counter certain monopolies, it's not. The state should require the pillars of OSS stated above in order to perform it's basic functions to the citizen body.
I think Tim O'Reilly put it best when he said, in a recent weblog: "...any victory for open source achieved through deprivation of the user's right to choose would indeed be a betrayal of the principles that free software and open source have stood for."
This is clearly out of scope. Tim O'Reilly is refering to the users right to choose between several products. This debate is over the goverment mandating the pillars of OSS in the name of security, data reliablity, and open data formats; What this argument is not about is the pillars of OSS as they apply to consumers and buisnesses. Quoting Adam Smith, I'm sure your well aware that the state and private insititutions must uphold entirely diffrent values.
Some say that the "Digital Software Security Act," as the California proposal is disingenuously called, isn't true protection. Proprietary companies just have to open their source code in order to compete for government contracts.[irony implied]
As I have stated many times, the goverment is setting standards over what it should require from software. It's the software providers responsibility to apease the goverment, not the other way around. You really make no counter argument here, you just claim this is not so. To counter I say that it is so.
Well, America just has to stop growing GM (Genetically Modified) food to gain access to European markets, even though all scientific evidence indicates that GM food is not harmful.
This is true, they do. Whats your point? I can cite the reasons to disalow GM food, but that is completly and totally beyond the scope of this dicussions.
E-Commerce sites in the US just have to adhere to European VAT rules to be allowed to sell to Europeans.
Yes they do. Again, this is totally offbase and provides nothing to the dicussion. It is not a support to the above point, because your above point was not a point.
Europeans just have to buy struggling American steel companies to avoid getting hit by George W's recent steel tariffs.
I'm not seeing how a european owned steel company exporting goods to europe is going to have any less tarrifs, but I have not followed this. Again straw man.
In other words, the fact that companies can alter their business structure in order to get around a "non-trade" barrier doesn't make it any less of a trade barrier.
No you have argued that tarrifs and trade regulations effect free trade. You have not shown in any way that regulations on goverment awarded contracts are a harm to free trade. Again straw man, and out of scope.
There are a number of important reasons why proprietary software companies might not want to open their source code, chief among them that revenue models based around the sale of an open source product aren't exactly known for their profits.
Is this support for your point with the [irony] in it? If so it is not the goverments responsibility to allow all bidders to bid, it is the goverments responsibility to uphold the ideas of security (no back doors), reliability of data, and open data formats for citizen audits. The goverment has no other responsibility in this situation that we have discussed so far, and I would love to see you try and counter this.
The trade barrier, in this case, operates through the fact that most companies currently making proprietary software would sooner replace their executive team with orangutans than discard a revenue model with a proven track record.
They don't have to discard that revenue model, they just have to provide the goverment full source under NDA. This argument is leaning towards absurditiy, but is still valid. Unfortunatly there is no trade barier. The goverment has no responsibility to break from its requirments simply to stimulate trade under a particular philosophy. It is unforunate that people have come to associate OSS always with FSF, because OSS in this situation is simply the following of the three pillars I laied out earlier.
Of course, who says anyone should care about the plight of proprietary software companies? Open source code is free, and that's a good thing as stated at the beginning of this article. Why shouldn't government get the most bang for its buck from our tax dollars?
The cost of a product in tax dollars pales in comparison to the requirment of the goverment to avoid backdoors and provide it's citizens with open formated data. The goverment should be worried about functionality and responsibility before cost when the cost increase is not absurd.
If you accept that argument, however, you are trapped in a logical conundrum. If you truly believe that government should get the most bang for its buck, then you must reject a policy that would prevent the government from doing a proper cost-benefit analysis to determine what, truly, provides the most bang for the buck.
Your mythical "Bang for the Buck" is again of no consequence in this discussion. The goverment has a responsibility to the voting public to uphold the three pillars of OSS stated above, and cost is secondary to them by far.
As I mentioned in a past article, good ideas aren't the exclusive domain of open source programmers. What if a particular government agency would benefit the most from standardizing on Oracle databases? Perhaps its personnel are trained on Oracle, or Oracle developers are easier to find than MySQL developers. Perhaps Oracle works better with existing systems, or other products in the marketplace. Perhaps there are more development tools available, or more add-on software that the agency finds useful. Perhaps, horror of horrors, Oracle is just BETTER than the open source alternative, at least with respect to the features that matter to the agency in question.
Then if they can provide the citizens with open formated data, and the system is proven not to have a back door, it is apropriate for special situations to get grants to non OSS software. In almost no situation is it not worth investigating the alternatives though. Also since oracle can simply provide the code to a single agency under NDA, it is absurd that oracle would fail to fall under the pillars of OSS stated above if they really want the contract.
All that MIGHT just add up to making Oracle worth the money some government agency spends on it.
It very well might, again that is of no consequence to the fact they are giving up the ability to protect themselves from rogue corperations, or meer employees of said corperations. And if they fail at all three pillars of OSS, they also would not provide a reliable data solution to the taxpayers, nor would they allow the citizens to keep the goverment in check. This raises the bar on goverment data from literacy to reverse engineering training, a huge jump for any organization to take lightly.
A policy that mandates that government not be allowed to make that calculation is a policy that will result in less efficient usage of tax dollars, as government is forced to favor an open source option even if, in the aggregate, a proprietary solution was more cost effective.
Again, as I have countered above, being cost effective is not the end all when it comes to goverment. Goverements are required to adhere to the values stated many times by me now, not just save cash getting the quickest solution.
Over time, things can only get worse. Protectionism impoverishes a country, which is why nations around the world are busy opening their markets to foreign competition. What applies at the macroeconomic level applies at the microeconomic level. Protectionism won't help the progress of open source any more than it boosts the efficiency of protected industries in Chile (or steel companies in the United States).
I believe we have concluded that the goverment setting requirments on software, that it buys, which are in the interest of the democratic public, is not protectionism any more than requiring certain specs when getting roads done is.
Open source is supposed to be about freedom.
Said who, what, where, why, when, how.
Unfortunately, certain advocates have lost sight of that goal.
This has nothing to do with RMS vs. Bill gates, it has everything to do with code auditability, data reliablity, and open formats for data.
People should be free to use software which best fits their needs, whether or not it adheres to a particular programming philosophy.
Key word there is people, isn't it? It tires me how you mix and match peoples interestes and the goverment interest. The goverment has completly diffrent responsibilites than a free citizen, this should be obvious to a Adam Smith scholar of all people.
I suggest that open source proponents spend their time crafting interoperability guidelines rather than creating a protected environment, which artificially boosts open-source adoption while hiding it from the full rigors of competition.
I would state again it's not a protected envirment, but my tounge might fall out. Instead I'll just move on.
The goverment clearly has diffrent responibilities than a citizen, and thus has diffrent requirments. Some of those responsibilities require them to use OSS products, but that does not mean they need to back RMS. Even a product that releases its source under strict NDA is acceptable to the goverment, and it is perfectly valid that the goverment require this. A goverment must use open standards whenever possible, thusly they must audit the code to assure adherence to open standards. The goverment must also assure the ability to read its data in 10 years, the only way to promise this is open standards and non-expiring software, both of which are concepts of the "Goverment OSS" philosphy.
I think it's evident that the goverment upholding its responsibilities to citizens is in no way a protectionist envirment. If the goverment set absurd tarrifs, or required
I would love to hear a reply to this, as I'm sure I missed several points, and probably left myself wide open to some attacks. My email is sfritz@postmaster.co.uk
I counter with the fact that there are BSD licenses. In fact I run an "Open Source" machine on one of my servers, and not one single line of it's origional code came from a GPL license.
To claim that RMS is the definition of OSS implies you either are new to this argument, or are a troll. RMS does believe that all software should be free, he is one pillar of OSS. I on the other hand feel that OSS software should exist for comodity items (OS/Webserver..) and commercial software should provide "custom" or "exotic" functions, if there is a market for those solutions. OSS software should be usable in comercial products, and I feel that a company ought (moral obligation) to provide some kickback or recognition when they do.
To say that RMS is more important because he's writen Emacs and Hurd, where as I've only spit out a few drivers, is absurd. Both of us have opinions of what OSS is.
In this particular case the definition of "Free Software" should fall under the category of software that dosen't give a private company absolute control of your data. In no situation should a goverment be exchanging documents in a format that rely upon a certain non-open standard format for information exchange. This is comparable to a law being passed that contained parts of an IEEE spec, which would require people to buy the right to the spec in order to even read thier own law. Both of these are inapropriate for goverments to do, and should be avoided if possible.
MS is capable of creating "Free Software", and even selling it with thier current UELA if they so choose. They have currently shown a vested interest in not doing so, but that is MS's choice, not the goverments. The fact that alternatives to said software that does not perform for the goverment means the goverment ought to use the alternatives unless non-free software is the only way to perfom a certain task. (runon, but valid?)