I think the main thing I've learned by following the RIAA and associated international bodies over the past few years is that what we have here is essentially a cartel, that will do everything possible to keep its outdated business model intact.
I wish back in high school that I could have known that, when I was buying records, I was providing the bands I liked with almost no financial support. More than 95% of my purchase price was going straight to one of the most corrupt industries on the planet.
I'm not at all surprised to hear that the Netherlands' version of the RIAA is now going after individual users. The industry has clearly decided that the threat of litigation is about the only thing that's going to keep people buying CD's.
Except for one tiny thing. In the process of trying to scare people, they've made people like me their lifelong enemies. Now, where music is concerned, I have only two ambitions: one is to give the artists I like as much support as possible. And the other is to not give another penny of my money to RIAA labels. Quite simply, the RIAA has a completely different vision of the future than that of music lovers. They want to keep themselves as the middlemen in perpetuity, despite the fact that technology has the potential for making major labels irrelevant.
That's one reason why, as much as I love the iTunes radio store, I would never purchase an album from there that was produced by an RIAA affiliated label.
What people disgusted by RIAA actions need to do is to work hard to educate the public about why the industry does not deserve our support. Music lovers ought to be doing everything possible to starve out the RIAA affiliated labels, and to channel as much of their entertainment dollar directly to artists. And we should especially support artists who are wise enough to help us in this task -- artists who sign with magnatune, or who have a website set up so that they keep the bulk of every purchasing dollar.
I'm not marketing guy, but the more I think about this new plan, the less sense it makes to me. I have to ask, what on earth is the Netscape brand supposed to mean?
To me, the Netscape brand means browsers. After IE, it's probably the best known brand of browsers on the market. I've always thought the point of branding was to create a rock solid identity for a specific product, and then extend that product to new areas. For instance, Taco Bell creates a brand for Taco Bell tacos, and through incessant marketing convinces people that the slop actually tastes good. Then, once that brand is strong, they move on to marketing Taco Bell brand taco shells, that you can buy in any grocery store. You can see how there's a connection here, and how somebody who likes TB Tacos would be more likely to buy TB taco shells in the supermarket.
But with this Netscape thing, I don't get it. If Netscape isn't a brand name for a browser, what is it a brand name for? And what does a browser have to do with purchasing internet access?
The funny thing here, is that AOL/Time Warner already owns the top brand in ISP's: AOL. So why not come out with a $9.95 "AOL-Light", which you then cajole customers into upgrading to full-fledged AOL? Using Netscape as the brand for an entry-level ISP makes no sense whatever, whereas extending the AOL name makes perfect sense.
A couple things to keep in mind. AOL/Time Warner is a mess, and internet access is rapidly becoming commodified. The glory days of AOL will never be back, and we're going to see an era of throat-cutting competitive tactics amongst large ISP's that are similar to what the telcos are now going through.
Given the outright incompetence in the overall strategic vision at AOL/TW, there's no telling if this new plan is an act of foresight or of desperation.
Still, I have to say that it makes sense to leverage both the Netscape and AOL brands. They're obviously positioning Netscape as the low-cost bare-bones option for dialup ISP service, and I bet that subscribers will be incessantly prompted to upgrade to the features found on AOL.
How a posting that "copyrights are still wrong" could be marked +5 insightful is beyond me.
I'm a full-time writer, and I've been living off savings for the past eighteen months writing a new book. Thanks to copyright, I can reasonably expect to earn enough money once my book is published to stay afloat financially, and to tackle additional projects.
When I see posts like the parent one, it makes me think that there's a lot of Slashdot people who truly believe that every creative product that can be digitized or photocopied should enter the public domain.
I'm a huge advocate of open source, and I think I'm very generous with allowing access to my own work. Fr'instance, I made my first book a free PDF download on my website. But I keep seeing a sizable number of posts on Slashdot that argue that every piece of computer code, writing, music, or art ought to be exempt from copyright. That's nonsense, and it would destroy the foundation that allows a vast amount of our best art to be created.
I'm the first one to agree that today's Bono-fied, Disney-fied copyright terms are outrageous. I tend to think ten or twenty years on a book or film ought to be plenty. After that, the public domain would be enriched -- while the people who created it would still have time to be compensated for their work. But take away all copyright protection and people like me would be stripped of our financial viability, and our ability to contribute.
This book I'm finishing now has taken me eighteen months, and every day I've woken up and worked until I could no longer think clearly. Writing this thing, to make it as good as it is, in this short of a time, would never have been possible if I had a day job. And without the prospect of future financial return that copyright delivers, I could never have devoted myself full-time to this project. Take copyright protections away and my work, plus a whole lot of other great music/art/writing, could never be created.
Sure, there will always be some people who can afford to create and give away their work, and some of these creations will be superb. But copyright vastly increases the number of people out there who can devote huge chunks of their time to putting their heart and soul into creative projects. Just because my stuff can be digitized doesn't mean it should be seized by law and put into public domain the moment I show it to anybody. If the parent poster sincerely feels that way, perhaps he can apply that same spirit and send me his next paycheck -- by his standard, I'm just as entitled to it as he is.
The video's unrunnable already because their server is no doubt getting hammered. But I looked at the sample screen and the write-up and frankly, I don't get it.
The more dimensions you've got, the more places things can get lost -- this applies equally for car keys, lost souls, and music files. One of the beauties of a two dimensional windowing environment is it puts everything right up front where you can see it. A three dimensional environment creates the same problems I've already got in my house; things could be anywhere.
How long will it be before people using this environment spend an hour rummaging around for something they know they left somewhere, but turns out to be hidden behind some other item? It'll be just like today, when you spend two hours looking for you checkbook, wondering if you accidentally threw it out, and finally find it had fallen under your old hiking boots in the closet. I get quite enough 3D at home, thank you. I think I'll pass on using it for my windowing manager.
Add to this that, in the absence of 3D goggles, everything in 3D is going to appear annoyingly false. And while I bet goggles will be amazing for games and certain specific applications, I don't want my day-to-day working environment to gratuitiously throw in an extra dimension I don't need. It's just one more thing to keep track of. And at the risk of sounding like an old man, the sample screen shot looks like something that would give me a massive headache if I had to deal with it all day.
Well, even though it's called Java Desktop System, it really seems more like a (hopefully) highly polished front end of a pre-installed Linux distribution. Here's a FAQ from Sun. And here's a link to the project homepage.
This proposed Walmart deal strikes me as exactly what Red Hat would be trying to do, if they were remaining in the market as a consumer distribution. The article doesn't even attempt to define the Java Desktop System (hence the above links), so there's really nothing in the way of comments as to how good the thing is.
Also, does the "Java" in the name of this product really mean that the desktop is in fact written in Java? I can't imagine that's the case, or why it would be desirable. But one analyst quoted in the article seems to take it as a given that this thing is written in Java:
I personally keep Java off my computer because it crashes the system...If Sun had the interests of the customer in mind, then the Sun desktop would be written in C and donated to Linux. Sun is no better than Microsoft.
From what I can see, if this deal comes to pass, Walmart may soon be selling Linux based systems with a highly polished front end, equipped with a suite of office/internet software that does everything an entry-level buyer could want. Seems to me that this would be a big step up from people buying XP boxes. It would increase the market share of Linux, and result in way more Linux software being developed.
So I have two questions. If anyone here has used the Java Desktop System, what do you think? And does anyone see any real downside to Linux if this deal is made?
The Glaring Flaw in Darl's GPL argument
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 5, Informative
I suffered through reading Darl's open letter last night, and I just read Lessig's response. A few observations:
In my experience, when somebody has a strong argument about why they have been wronged, the argument is fairly easy to make and usually reads clearly and with a logical flow. But since SCO won't put up or shut up regarding the allegedly pilfered code (and what little they put up was thoroughly debunked) -- Darl is stuck making this hard-to-follow argument about why his company's business practices are what the Founding Fathers fantasized about when writing the constitution.
So instead of getting clear and convincing evidence that SCO's code was stolen, we get this poorly written argument that the GPL is immoral and illegal.
Let me make a comment on the GPL that Lessig hasn't made, and that I think gets to the heart of why Darl's arguments are pathetic.
I think Darl would have a great case that the GPL is illegal if the terms of the GPL license conferred greater privileges to the software developer than do licenses that come with store-bought proprietary software. But the fact is that, under the GPL, the developer is voluntarily surrendering some of the rights he would gain under normal copyright. And he's not claiming any other rights beyond what's normally handed out under the copyright law.
This is where Darl's anti-GPL argument breaks down. He's given no convincing explanation why a software developer can't voluntarily surrender some, but not all, of the rights gained by copyright.
Frankly, the only reason everybody's not tearing gaping holes in Darl's open letter is that it's so poorly written that it's hard to know what the hell he's talking about.
in space, no one can hear farm animals scream
on
Eating in Space
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· Score: 4, Interesting
There are essentially two ways to feed astronauts in space: to send food with them, or have them grow their own. Both choices pose problems, and this article only looked at the first choice. I personally find the second choice, the growing of food in space, to be far more interesting.
After all, even with months-long space station stays, today's space stations are the equivalent of summer camp compared to what future astronauts will go through. Even if warp drives prove possible -- an enormous if -- astronauts will have to spend years aboard spacecraft to even reach relatively nearby parts of interstellar space.
That being the case, the growing of food in space becomes practically a necessity. As space voyages lengthen, it becomes laughably inefficient to produce on earth the tons of food neccessary for the trip , and blast it into space.
Growing food in space poses all kinds of challenges that make today's pre-packaged problems look trivial. Right from the start, it appears that producing meat, milk, and eggs in space is going to be prohibitively inexpensive. So instead, NASA is funding investigations into growing plants hydroponically--probably extracting minerals from astronaut's crap and urine. Doing this gets around the problem of having to send tons of food into space.
The challenges of having animal agriculture in space are so extreme that it appears that virtually all serious research on space-borne food production is confined to vegan foods. This is purely a practical thing -- it's not as though the scientists at NASA have developed a sudden interest in animal rights. In fact, current studies involving vegan food production in space involve using rats to assess nutritional adequacies of what's being grown.
But vegans can take heart. Even if they don't bring down animal agriculture on earth by 2525, it's a fair bet that Major Tom, blasting towards the Dog Star, will be eating a vegan diet -- whether he likes it or not.
Today's Wall Street Journal has an article (subscription required)
This article's a dream come true all of us who post on Slashdot without first reading the article. Finally, we've got a good comeback for all those pests who tell us to go RTFA (read the fucking article.)
I hope this begins a trend, and I look forward to many more Slashdot stories centered around articles I don't have subscription privileges to read. You can count on me and hundreds of others to post responses to these stories, confident in the knowledge that we have no clue as to what the article says, and knowing nobody else does either.
The form factor is exactly what you'd expect from something with Dell on the nameplate: it's totally nondescript. It's actually made by Creative Labs and rebranded. As far as looks go, it's not an iPod any more than my 1990 Accord is a Porsche 911. In other words, it's not bad looking, but it's not good looking either.
2) What advantages does it have?
It looks like there's one, and only one, big advantage of this over the iPod -- this thing has a 16 hour battery life (The Tech TV people tested it and says you will get 15 hours.) That is a really compelling feature; when I spend an entire day driving, or have a long flight with a nasty layover, I can toast my iPod's battery.
The Dell is also a bit cheaper, but not by a lot. A 20 MB unit goes for $329, while Apple sells its 20 MB iPod for $399 at its store. I'd personally want to see the Dell more like 50% cheaper than the iPod for it to be a compelling alternative.
3) Is it an iPod killer?
In battery life, yes. In price, sort of. In looks, absolutely not. Tech TV gives a slight nod to the iPod, but without saying why.
Dell's entry into the field just means that digital music players are no longer cutting-edge products, and are about to be commodified. Expect to be able to get a good one, though perhaps not an iPod, for under $100 within the next couple years.
Perhaps state governments will never be able to stop one man spamming operations that are being run on a shoestring. But there has to be a starting point in fighting spammers, and it makes sense to pick out the largest targets possible. In one stroke, it appears that California has ended PW Marketing's business. And very likely, the state will come out ahead after the fines are paid.
Perhaps the greatest asset that anti-spamming forces have going for them is that spammers don't have the foggiest idea where each of their spams are going to. Who knows whether joeblow@hotmail.com is an account based in California or Timbuktu? And that, I believe, will pose spammers with an insurmountable problem. They are going to have to make all their spams California-legal, because there's probably not a single spam list out there that doesn't target at least a few dozen people in California.
Now clearly there will be some people who will say, "This law is unenforceable against offshore spammers." That's fine. The question is, do you want spams coming from both domestic and offshore spamhauses? Getting rid of spam sent within the United States will wipe out a large part of the problem; and not just in terms of numbers of spams sent. It will also disproportionately harm spammers with the greatest financial resources and the greatest technical expertise to overcome spam filters.
On a side note, I've noticed that for the first time in memory, my daily spam load over the past couple of months hasn't gone up. There's blood in the water.
And what do you suppose will happen when a reverse engineer figures out the encryption technique used and just intercepts the outgoing signal from your "key"?
I think if that happens, it wouldn't tangibly affect the amount of car theft. Just look how things are today. Almost every police officer or tow truck operator carries what's essentially a fancy coat hanger in their trunk that will slide under the window and unlock just about any car door. And any second-rate thug knows how to hot wire a car or jimmy the door to your house. Yet, even with this, car theft and burglary isn't an enormous problem.
But having said that, I'll concede the point that bluetooth isn't appropriate. Fine. I'll still happily take a line-of-sight infrared (or, better yet, laser) device to open my door, start my car, and get into my house. That way, I'll never have to worry about my car and house entry codes getting leaked.
Many people these days are stuck carrying around three things when they go out: a phone to communicate, a wallet to pay for stuff, and a set of keys for car and house. This is silly.
There's no reason why an infrared or bluetooth port on a cellphone couldn't be made to unlock doors and start ignitions. Think how great would it be to only need one device to communicate, start your car, and pay for whatever you need when you go out.
Up until now, the cell phone has added yet another thing to take with you and keep track of when you go out. Instead, with a bit of innovation using already-existing technologies, it could easily be the only thing you need to bring. I'd be more than happy to skip the camera/color screen/instant messaging features for my next phone -- what I really want is for my cellphone get rid of my keys and wallet.
I just got a memo that they'll be laying off 30 people in engineering, starting with Dan. The fucktards have disabled forwarding permissions for it, but drop by my desk on your way to lunch if you want to see.
You've asked for statistics, but this is a case where none are really needed. Logic is good enough. What you've asked for can't be all that easily studied. Harvesting email addresses from opt-out lists has to be about the sleaziest thing a spammer could do. And you'll agree that the sleaziest spammers forge headers. So, how on earth could you be 100% certain that your act of opting out has caused a given piece of spam?
All you can do is look at the spam industry itself, and ask, "why wouldn't they harvest opt-outs for future spamming?" By opting out, after all, you've just given proof that the email address in question is valuable to you. Why wouldn't they want to take advantage of that piece of information. Do you think spammers suddenly adopt scruples on this point? Given how unscrupulous spammers are in every other aspect of what they do, I think it's absurd to think they treat opt-out lists with any integrity.
That opt-out lists will be abused by spammers is common-sense. I think the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise.
The idea of using P2P for the legal distribution of music is plain stupid.
The cost to serve a four megabyte MP3 file is pennies. If I'm a musical artist, I'm more than happy to swallow that cost if I'm getting fifty cents or a dollar per song.
If I'm selling my own music over the Internet, I want people to come to my site and eat up my bandwidth. If I can establish some loyalty, and make my site a repeat destination for my fans, they're likely to check back regularly and see what new MP3's I've created.
If my music gets sold by P2P networks, I've lost the ability to make my home page the primary source of purchases for my music. Sure, I'll save a few pennies in bandwidth fees for each user who downloads from P2P...but chances are I'll paying the P2P companies much more than that for administration.
No, if you're a musician, you want people to rely on your website for all downloads of your music. And you'll be thrilled to pay any bandwidth fees that are incurred by people purchasing music, as those fees are trivial.
I've been following this issue, and it seems to me that the real story here is the potential for sales tax to make Mom & Pop Internet stores impossible.
It seems there's some controversy in how this thing would be implemented. The authors wanted stores with annual sales of less than about $5 million to be exempt from the tax, since keeping track of sales tax for fifty different states is incredibly cumbersome. Amazon, however, wants a much lower limit. They're trying to force businesses who take in at least 25 or 50 grand each year to pay sales tax.
I think it would be a real shame if this thing goes through, with taxes kicking in at sales in the tens of thousands of dollars. As Amazon must well know, setting up sales tax collection and payment for 50 states would be an absolute nightmare for small sites.
I mean, what a disaster. You're running a site with $55,000 in sales, and now you've got to administrate collecting and routing sales tax for 50 different states, even though you only take in 1500 orders a year. Think of all the paperwork and hours lost, all for the sake of, say, $60 tax per state.
That explains why sites like Amazon.com would be willing to endorse a proposal that cuts into their profits. It's obviously worth losing a few percentage points on the bottom line, if doing so creates new barriers of entry to tiny upstarts.
From the summary:
And no, they don't have Marble Man.
Wow. That was definitely an out-of-the-blue observation.
As far as I'm concerned, Marble Madness was the supreme mid-1980s arcade game. I played that game hundreds of times in high school, and won it at least a dozen times. A couple things set it apart. It had a cool 3D-style isometric viewpoint, which was done infinitely more convincingly than similar presentations like Zaxxon. Plus, given how hard you had to throw that trackball around, you could get a legitimate workout playing Marble Madness.
I think Marble Madness was sort of a smart person's Donkey Kong. It had a great subtle sense of humor, and a Steve Jobsian attention to detail. Like, fr'instance, the marble you controlled had glitter in it that would roll around as the ball rolled. And it could die in several twisted ways, from shattering to getting eaten by acid. The graphics were some of the best yet for 1980s videogames, and the music was likewise sensational.
After Marble Madness' success, a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was, some genius in marketing thought that for people to identify with our beloved marble, it had to assume human qualities. Thus, Marble Man was born.
Unfortunately, Marble Man never quite got out of testing before the crashing arcade scene made Atari withdraw it from market. I'm not sure if anyone knows where the few original ROM's are anymore. But one thing's for sure...there are thousands of Marble Maniacs out there who would buy it in a heartbeat, just to see if the original was surpassed.
One last note. The creator of Marble Madness programmed the game at the tender age of about twenty. He's since gone on to do a number of successful games, including Ratchet & Clank on the Playstation 2.
I've been on the sidelines ever since PDA's came out. They always seemed like a nice thing to have, but they've either been too expensive or too toylike to be worth buying. The original Zire caught my eye, but with a 33 Mhz processor and 2 megs RAM, it just seemed like a pathetically underpowered unit.
The 21 seems to rectify those problems with being underpowered. I'm sure that in a month or so, you'll be able to buy refurbished 21's for $80 or so. At that point I might finally cave in and get one.
What surprises me, and the thing that's kept me on the sidelines so long, is that none of the units offer 802.11 B. A friend of mine has a Handspring with an 802.11 B card, and speaks the world of it. I bet a lot of folks would jump in and start using PDA's, when 802.11 B becomes a standard feature.
Remember when most people bought Microsoft Word as a standalone app for $400 or so? And way back in the early-1980s, I think the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet alone went for $595.
Years ago, competition from Corel and others forced Microsoft to bundle Word with their other apps, and sell the whole thing for about what they used to get just for Word.
Graphic apps aren't used by nearly so many people as office apps, so it makes sense the trend of bundling graphic apps would lag. But it seems the time has come that Adobe can no longer make a killing selling their graphic apps as standalone products.
I'm sure that Adobe will still be having a nice business selling this suite, long after OpenOffice.org has finished eating Microsoft's lunch. But this latest development really shows the trend that software takes: high priced single app, followed years later by mid-priced bundled apps, followed by steep discounts as open source competition commodifies the sector.
The article doesn't answer the main questions raised by this court ruling.
First, does it effectly halt the do-not-call list's use for the other 49 states? It would be a shame if a state with a population of just 3.5 million could cause the scrapping of a list that protects 50 million Americans from unwanted calls.
The other question left unanswered is where this ruling will be appealed. Does it go to a higher Oklahoma court, or to the Supreme Court, or what?
In the 'oops' category, the RIAA was forced to withdraw its suit against a 66 year old computer neophyte (read Apple User for god's sake) when they discovered she thought 'Kazaa' was a magician playing at local kids' birthday parties.
That's super funny; only one problem. It doesn't seem to mention the magician thing anywhere in the linked article.
I've been working on a book for the past year, and I spent many hours thinking hard before settling on my writing tool of choice. It wasn't my G4 tower with flat panel, nor was it my 1.6 gigahertz Vaio with flat panel. I decided the optimal tool for writing my book was a 266 Mhz Thinkpad I scored last summer off eBay for about $250.
I prefered the Thinkpad for a couple of reasons. First, it had the best keyboard I've ever used. Second, I deliberately never installed games, nor hooked it up to the Internet. So I was never tempted to check email or surf the web when I should be writing.
As for my word processor, OpenOffice did not until recently have a decent "draft mode" type view until recently. ABIword was too unstable (I don't know about the new 2.0 release.) So I've been using WordPerfect 10.0, which has the speed and flexibility I could desire, great footnoting, plus the ability to view embedded codes on the off chance your document gets screwed up.
I'd say right now, my dream system for writing would be:
A mini-PC
Flat panel
Thinkpad 600 Keyboard (how I wish I could buy the keyboard alone, that's why this is a dream PC.)
WordPerfect
A little shopping around for a used 1.6 Mhz system, and the whole thing shouldn't cost more than $400-$500. I couldn't ask for anything better for writing.
Yeah, I just saw the update you're talking about a few minutes ago, when I visited Microsoft's update center. I thought it was interesting they omitted the word "Digital", and simply called it "Rights Management." My guess is that it's probably because lots of people have been warned about DRM, but fewer windows users would guess that "rights management" means precisely that.
And on another issue, where's the button in Windows Update that says, "I don't want to add this patch ever, so stop bothering me!"? Looks like as long as I use Windows Update in the future, I'm going to be stuck having to look at this offered DRM patch, and that I'll always have to remember to refuse it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish back in high school that I could have known that, when I was buying records, I was providing the bands I liked with almost no financial support. More than 95% of my purchase price was going straight to one of the most corrupt industries on the planet.
I'm not at all surprised to hear that the Netherlands' version of the RIAA is now going after individual users. The industry has clearly decided that the threat of litigation is about the only thing that's going to keep people buying CD's.
Except for one tiny thing. In the process of trying to scare people, they've made people like me their lifelong enemies. Now, where music is concerned, I have only two ambitions: one is to give the artists I like as much support as possible. And the other is to not give another penny of my money to RIAA labels. Quite simply, the RIAA has a completely different vision of the future than that of music lovers. They want to keep themselves as the middlemen in perpetuity, despite the fact that technology has the potential for making major labels irrelevant.
That's one reason why, as much as I love the iTunes radio store, I would never purchase an album from there that was produced by an RIAA affiliated label.
What people disgusted by RIAA actions need to do is to work hard to educate the public about why the industry does not deserve our support. Music lovers ought to be doing everything possible to starve out the RIAA affiliated labels, and to channel as much of their entertainment dollar directly to artists. And we should especially support artists who are wise enough to help us in this task -- artists who sign with magnatune, or who have a website set up so that they keep the bulk of every purchasing dollar.
To me, the Netscape brand means browsers. After IE, it's probably the best known brand of browsers on the market. I've always thought the point of branding was to create a rock solid identity for a specific product, and then extend that product to new areas. For instance, Taco Bell creates a brand for Taco Bell tacos, and through incessant marketing convinces people that the slop actually tastes good. Then, once that brand is strong, they move on to marketing Taco Bell brand taco shells, that you can buy in any grocery store. You can see how there's a connection here, and how somebody who likes TB Tacos would be more likely to buy TB taco shells in the supermarket.
But with this Netscape thing, I don't get it. If Netscape isn't a brand name for a browser, what is it a brand name for? And what does a browser have to do with purchasing internet access?
The funny thing here, is that AOL/Time Warner already owns the top brand in ISP's: AOL. So why not come out with a $9.95 "AOL-Light", which you then cajole customers into upgrading to full-fledged AOL? Using Netscape as the brand for an entry-level ISP makes no sense whatever, whereas extending the AOL name makes perfect sense.
Given the outright incompetence in the overall strategic vision at AOL/TW, there's no telling if this new plan is an act of foresight or of desperation.
Still, I have to say that it makes sense to leverage both the Netscape and AOL brands. They're obviously positioning Netscape as the low-cost bare-bones option for dialup ISP service, and I bet that subscribers will be incessantly prompted to upgrade to the features found on AOL.
I'm a full-time writer, and I've been living off savings for the past eighteen months writing a new book. Thanks to copyright, I can reasonably expect to earn enough money once my book is published to stay afloat financially, and to tackle additional projects.
When I see posts like the parent one, it makes me think that there's a lot of Slashdot people who truly believe that every creative product that can be digitized or photocopied should enter the public domain.
I'm a huge advocate of open source, and I think I'm very generous with allowing access to my own work. Fr'instance, I made my first book a free PDF download on my website. But I keep seeing a sizable number of posts on Slashdot that argue that every piece of computer code, writing, music, or art ought to be exempt from copyright. That's nonsense, and it would destroy the foundation that allows a vast amount of our best art to be created.
I'm the first one to agree that today's Bono-fied, Disney-fied copyright terms are outrageous. I tend to think ten or twenty years on a book or film ought to be plenty. After that, the public domain would be enriched -- while the people who created it would still have time to be compensated for their work. But take away all copyright protection and people like me would be stripped of our financial viability, and our ability to contribute.
This book I'm finishing now has taken me eighteen months, and every day I've woken up and worked until I could no longer think clearly. Writing this thing, to make it as good as it is, in this short of a time, would never have been possible if I had a day job. And without the prospect of future financial return that copyright delivers, I could never have devoted myself full-time to this project. Take copyright protections away and my work, plus a whole lot of other great music/art/writing, could never be created.
Sure, there will always be some people who can afford to create and give away their work, and some of these creations will be superb. But copyright vastly increases the number of people out there who can devote huge chunks of their time to putting their heart and soul into creative projects. Just because my stuff can be digitized doesn't mean it should be seized by law and put into public domain the moment I show it to anybody. If the parent poster sincerely feels that way, perhaps he can apply that same spirit and send me his next paycheck -- by his standard, I'm just as entitled to it as he is.
The more dimensions you've got, the more places things can get lost -- this applies equally for car keys, lost souls, and music files. One of the beauties of a two dimensional windowing environment is it puts everything right up front where you can see it. A three dimensional environment creates the same problems I've already got in my house; things could be anywhere.
How long will it be before people using this environment spend an hour rummaging around for something they know they left somewhere, but turns out to be hidden behind some other item? It'll be just like today, when you spend two hours looking for you checkbook, wondering if you accidentally threw it out, and finally find it had fallen under your old hiking boots in the closet. I get quite enough 3D at home, thank you. I think I'll pass on using it for my windowing manager.
Add to this that, in the absence of 3D goggles, everything in 3D is going to appear annoyingly false. And while I bet goggles will be amazing for games and certain specific applications, I don't want my day-to-day working environment to gratuitiously throw in an extra dimension I don't need. It's just one more thing to keep track of. And at the risk of sounding like an old man, the sample screen shot looks like something that would give me a massive headache if I had to deal with it all day.
This proposed Walmart deal strikes me as exactly what Red Hat would be trying to do, if they were remaining in the market as a consumer distribution. The article doesn't even attempt to define the Java Desktop System (hence the above links), so there's really nothing in the way of comments as to how good the thing is.
Also, does the "Java" in the name of this product really mean that the desktop is in fact written in Java? I can't imagine that's the case, or why it would be desirable. But one analyst quoted in the article seems to take it as a given that this thing is written in Java:
I personally keep Java off my computer because it crashes the system...If Sun had the interests of the customer in mind, then the Sun desktop would be written in C and donated to Linux. Sun is no better than Microsoft.
From what I can see, if this deal comes to pass, Walmart may soon be selling Linux based systems with a highly polished front end, equipped with a suite of office/internet software that does everything an entry-level buyer could want. Seems to me that this would be a big step up from people buying XP boxes. It would increase the market share of Linux, and result in way more Linux software being developed.
So I have two questions. If anyone here has used the Java Desktop System, what do you think? And does anyone see any real downside to Linux if this deal is made?
In my experience, when somebody has a strong argument about why they have been wronged, the argument is fairly easy to make and usually reads clearly and with a logical flow. But since SCO won't put up or shut up regarding the allegedly pilfered code (and what little they put up was thoroughly debunked) -- Darl is stuck making this hard-to-follow argument about why his company's business practices are what the Founding Fathers fantasized about when writing the constitution.
So instead of getting clear and convincing evidence that SCO's code was stolen, we get this poorly written argument that the GPL is immoral and illegal.
Let me make a comment on the GPL that Lessig hasn't made, and that I think gets to the heart of why Darl's arguments are pathetic.
I think Darl would have a great case that the GPL is illegal if the terms of the GPL license conferred greater privileges to the software developer than do licenses that come with store-bought proprietary software. But the fact is that, under the GPL, the developer is voluntarily surrendering some of the rights he would gain under normal copyright. And he's not claiming any other rights beyond what's normally handed out under the copyright law.
This is where Darl's anti-GPL argument breaks down. He's given no convincing explanation why a software developer can't voluntarily surrender some, but not all, of the rights gained by copyright.
Frankly, the only reason everybody's not tearing gaping holes in Darl's open letter is that it's so poorly written that it's hard to know what the hell he's talking about.
After all, even with months-long space station stays, today's space stations are the equivalent of summer camp compared to what future astronauts will go through. Even if warp drives prove possible -- an enormous if -- astronauts will have to spend years aboard spacecraft to even reach relatively nearby parts of interstellar space.
That being the case, the growing of food in space becomes practically a necessity. As space voyages lengthen, it becomes laughably inefficient to produce on earth the tons of food neccessary for the trip , and blast it into space.
Growing food in space poses all kinds of challenges that make today's pre-packaged problems look trivial. Right from the start, it appears that producing meat, milk, and eggs in space is going to be prohibitively inexpensive. So instead, NASA is funding investigations into growing plants hydroponically--probably extracting minerals from astronaut's crap and urine. Doing this gets around the problem of having to send tons of food into space.
The challenges of having animal agriculture in space are so extreme that it appears that virtually all serious research on space-borne food production is confined to vegan foods. This is purely a practical thing -- it's not as though the scientists at NASA have developed a sudden interest in animal rights. In fact, current studies involving vegan food production in space involve using rats to assess nutritional adequacies of what's being grown.
But vegans can take heart. Even if they don't bring down animal agriculture on earth by 2525, it's a fair bet that Major Tom, blasting towards the Dog Star, will be eating a vegan diet -- whether he likes it or not.
This article's a dream come true all of us who post on Slashdot without first reading the article. Finally, we've got a good comeback for all those pests who tell us to go RTFA (read the fucking article.)
I hope this begins a trend, and I look forward to many more Slashdot stories centered around articles I don't have subscription privileges to read. You can count on me and hundreds of others to post responses to these stories, confident in the knowledge that we have no clue as to what the article says, and knowing nobody else does either.
Again, fantastic work!
The form factor is exactly what you'd expect from something with Dell on the nameplate: it's totally nondescript. It's actually made by Creative Labs and rebranded. As far as looks go, it's not an iPod any more than my 1990 Accord is a Porsche 911. In other words, it's not bad looking, but it's not good looking either.
2) What advantages does it have?
It looks like there's one, and only one, big advantage of this over the iPod -- this thing has a 16 hour battery life (The Tech TV people tested it and says you will get 15 hours.) That is a really compelling feature; when I spend an entire day driving, or have a long flight with a nasty layover, I can toast my iPod's battery.
The Dell is also a bit cheaper, but not by a lot. A 20 MB unit goes for $329, while Apple sells its 20 MB iPod for $399 at its store. I'd personally want to see the Dell more like 50% cheaper than the iPod for it to be a compelling alternative.
3) Is it an iPod killer?
In battery life, yes. In price, sort of. In looks, absolutely not. Tech TV gives a slight nod to the iPod, but without saying why.
Dell's entry into the field just means that digital music players are no longer cutting-edge products, and are about to be commodified. Expect to be able to get a good one, though perhaps not an iPod, for under $100 within the next couple years.
Perhaps the greatest asset that anti-spamming forces have going for them is that spammers don't have the foggiest idea where each of their spams are going to. Who knows whether joeblow@hotmail.com is an account based in California or Timbuktu? And that, I believe, will pose spammers with an insurmountable problem. They are going to have to make all their spams California-legal, because there's probably not a single spam list out there that doesn't target at least a few dozen people in California.
Now clearly there will be some people who will say, "This law is unenforceable against offshore spammers." That's fine. The question is, do you want spams coming from both domestic and offshore spamhauses? Getting rid of spam sent within the United States will wipe out a large part of the problem; and not just in terms of numbers of spams sent. It will also disproportionately harm spammers with the greatest financial resources and the greatest technical expertise to overcome spam filters.
On a side note, I've noticed that for the first time in memory, my daily spam load over the past couple of months hasn't gone up. There's blood in the water.
And what do you suppose will happen when a reverse engineer figures out the encryption technique used and just intercepts the outgoing signal from your "key"?
I think if that happens, it wouldn't tangibly affect the amount of car theft. Just look how things are today. Almost every police officer or tow truck operator carries what's essentially a fancy coat hanger in their trunk that will slide under the window and unlock just about any car door. And any second-rate thug knows how to hot wire a car or jimmy the door to your house. Yet, even with this, car theft and burglary isn't an enormous problem.
But having said that, I'll concede the point that bluetooth isn't appropriate. Fine. I'll still happily take a line-of-sight infrared (or, better yet, laser) device to open my door, start my car, and get into my house. That way, I'll never have to worry about my car and house entry codes getting leaked.
There's no reason why an infrared or bluetooth port on a cellphone couldn't be made to unlock doors and start ignitions. Think how great would it be to only need one device to communicate, start your car, and pay for whatever you need when you go out.
Up until now, the cell phone has added yet another thing to take with you and keep track of when you go out. Instead, with a bit of innovation using already-existing technologies, it could easily be the only thing you need to bring. I'd be more than happy to skip the camera/color screen/instant messaging features for my next phone -- what I really want is for my cellphone get rid of my keys and wallet.
Great having beers with you last night.
I just got a memo that they'll be laying off 30 people in engineering, starting with Dan. The fucktards have disabled forwarding permissions for it, but drop by my desk on your way to lunch if you want to see.
Ron
The US Government is spending $53,000,000 over the next 5 years to make sure everybody knows that this is a real note, so go get acquainted with one."
From the parent post:
Only in America will they spend $35 million dollars to promote something everyone already wants, money.
The other $18 million is being earmarked to fight dyslexia. Or was it $81 million?
All you can do is look at the spam industry itself, and ask, "why wouldn't they harvest opt-outs for future spamming?" By opting out, after all, you've just given proof that the email address in question is valuable to you. Why wouldn't they want to take advantage of that piece of information. Do you think spammers suddenly adopt scruples on this point? Given how unscrupulous spammers are in every other aspect of what they do, I think it's absurd to think they treat opt-out lists with any integrity.
That opt-out lists will be abused by spammers is common-sense. I think the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise.
The cost to serve a four megabyte MP3 file is pennies. If I'm a musical artist, I'm more than happy to swallow that cost if I'm getting fifty cents or a dollar per song.
If I'm selling my own music over the Internet, I want people to come to my site and eat up my bandwidth. If I can establish some loyalty, and make my site a repeat destination for my fans, they're likely to check back regularly and see what new MP3's I've created.
If my music gets sold by P2P networks, I've lost the ability to make my home page the primary source of purchases for my music. Sure, I'll save a few pennies in bandwidth fees for each user who downloads from P2P...but chances are I'll paying the P2P companies much more than that for administration.
No, if you're a musician, you want people to rely on your website for all downloads of your music. And you'll be thrilled to pay any bandwidth fees that are incurred by people purchasing music, as those fees are trivial.
It seems there's some controversy in how this thing would be implemented. The authors wanted stores with annual sales of less than about $5 million to be exempt from the tax, since keeping track of sales tax for fifty different states is incredibly cumbersome. Amazon, however, wants a much lower limit. They're trying to force businesses who take in at least 25 or 50 grand each year to pay sales tax.
I think it would be a real shame if this thing goes through, with taxes kicking in at sales in the tens of thousands of dollars. As Amazon must well know, setting up sales tax collection and payment for 50 states would be an absolute nightmare for small sites.
I mean, what a disaster. You're running a site with $55,000 in sales, and now you've got to administrate collecting and routing sales tax for 50 different states, even though you only take in 1500 orders a year. Think of all the paperwork and hours lost, all for the sake of, say, $60 tax per state.
That explains why sites like Amazon.com would be willing to endorse a proposal that cuts into their profits. It's obviously worth losing a few percentage points on the bottom line, if doing so creates new barriers of entry to tiny upstarts.
Wow. That was definitely an out-of-the-blue observation.
As far as I'm concerned, Marble Madness was the supreme mid-1980s arcade game. I played that game hundreds of times in high school, and won it at least a dozen times. A couple things set it apart. It had a cool 3D-style isometric viewpoint, which was done infinitely more convincingly than similar presentations like Zaxxon. Plus, given how hard you had to throw that trackball around, you could get a legitimate workout playing Marble Madness.
I think Marble Madness was sort of a smart person's Donkey Kong. It had a great subtle sense of humor, and a Steve Jobsian attention to detail. Like, fr'instance, the marble you controlled had glitter in it that would roll around as the ball rolled. And it could die in several twisted ways, from shattering to getting eaten by acid. The graphics were some of the best yet for 1980s videogames, and the music was likewise sensational.
After Marble Madness' success, a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was, some genius in marketing thought that for people to identify with our beloved marble, it had to assume human qualities. Thus, Marble Man was born.
Unfortunately, Marble Man never quite got out of testing before the crashing arcade scene made Atari withdraw it from market. I'm not sure if anyone knows where the few original ROM's are anymore. But one thing's for sure...there are thousands of Marble Maniacs out there who would buy it in a heartbeat, just to see if the original was surpassed.
One last note. The creator of Marble Madness programmed the game at the tender age of about twenty. He's since gone on to do a number of successful games, including Ratchet & Clank on the Playstation 2.
The 21 seems to rectify those problems with being underpowered. I'm sure that in a month or so, you'll be able to buy refurbished 21's for $80 or so. At that point I might finally cave in and get one.
What surprises me, and the thing that's kept me on the sidelines so long, is that none of the units offer 802.11 B. A friend of mine has a Handspring with an 802.11 B card, and speaks the world of it. I bet a lot of folks would jump in and start using PDA's, when 802.11 B becomes a standard feature.
Remember when most people bought Microsoft Word as a standalone app for $400 or so? And way back in the early-1980s, I think the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet alone went for $595.
Years ago, competition from Corel and others forced Microsoft to bundle Word with their other apps, and sell the whole thing for about what they used to get just for Word.
Graphic apps aren't used by nearly so many people as office apps, so it makes sense the trend of bundling graphic apps would lag. But it seems the time has come that Adobe can no longer make a killing selling their graphic apps as standalone products.
I'm sure that Adobe will still be having a nice business selling this suite, long after OpenOffice.org has finished eating Microsoft's lunch. But this latest development really shows the trend that software takes: high priced single app, followed years later by mid-priced bundled apps, followed by steep discounts as open source competition commodifies the sector.
First, does it effectly halt the do-not-call list's use for the other 49 states? It would be a shame if a state with a population of just 3.5 million could cause the scrapping of a list that protects 50 million Americans from unwanted calls.
The other question left unanswered is where this ruling will be appealed. Does it go to a higher Oklahoma court, or to the Supreme Court, or what?
That's super funny; only one problem. It doesn't seem to mention the magician thing anywhere in the linked article.
I prefered the Thinkpad for a couple of reasons. First, it had the best keyboard I've ever used. Second, I deliberately never installed games, nor hooked it up to the Internet. So I was never tempted to check email or surf the web when I should be writing.
As for my word processor, OpenOffice did not until recently have a decent "draft mode" type view until recently. ABIword was too unstable (I don't know about the new 2.0 release.) So I've been using WordPerfect 10.0, which has the speed and flexibility I could desire, great footnoting, plus the ability to view embedded codes on the off chance your document gets screwed up.
I'd say right now, my dream system for writing would be:
A mini-PC
Flat panel
Thinkpad 600 Keyboard (how I wish I could buy the keyboard alone, that's why this is a dream PC.)
WordPerfect
A little shopping around for a used 1.6 Mhz system, and the whole thing shouldn't cost more than $400-$500. I couldn't ask for anything better for writing.
And on another issue, where's the button in Windows Update that says, "I don't want to add this patch ever, so stop bothering me!"? Looks like as long as I use Windows Update in the future, I'm going to be stuck having to look at this offered DRM patch, and that I'll always have to remember to refuse it.