And so long as folks like me are around, anyone who tries to enforce breeding limits on their fellow citizens will find themselves the subject of a post-natal abortion right quick.
Well there tough-guy, I guess there just aren't enough "folks like you" living in China, where "breeding limits" most definitely are "enforced". But you probably believe they're all just a bunch of pinko pansies, not red-blooded he-men American "folks" like you...
1. OK, here's really what we need - a system like MusicBrainz that can go thru and automagically tag everysong on your disc.
2. And then interface with the RIAA Radar to identify specifically the RIAA stuff vs. which isn't.
3. Then MOVE that stuff out of my shared folder - I don't *want* to share it. Better yet MOVE it to the TRASH...
I like electronica and sometimes underground hiphop anyway- I can live without FSOL and Jay-Z and certainly would much rather share out people more deserving of my disk space and bandwidth...
I happen to be one of those who believe that sharing music is not 'theft' because it doesn't deprive _anyone_ of their ability to possess (listen to, enjoy, etc.) said music. It's only theft if you take something _away_, not merely copy it.
Still, I find it very interesting that those of us here on the 'dot make such an effort to make the above argument, over and over, with regards to music, but that there's not nearly so much springing to the defense when it's about software piracy.
Why is that? Is it because many of us code for a living and actually like the high salaries that come with employment as software creators?
Could be, but a more likely reason is the high percentage of Free Software-heads that hang out here - the reasoning being along the lines of "why would you pirate a bunch of proprietary crap when you can d/l for free far superior Free software?".
My point is, why isn't there a large percentage of posters here saying "this is irrelevant to me, I only have Free (as in speech) Music on my drive" in the same way that folks are only to happy to point out that their boxen are 100% M$-free?
My own theory is that it's due to the lack of Free Music available - there certainly is some, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall supply. One could argue that it's not always the best quality stuff, either...
What's the solution then? Maybe it's time for some serious advocacy, perhaps? Convincing your friends who play in a band to release their stuff under some sort of free license? Maybe we could take a collection to support artists who take this bold step? I know I'd rather give $20 to such a fund (per month!) than pay $18 for a single crappy CD (of which cents go to the artist of course). Call it "aggregated patronage" - if enough of us did that we could support a thriving bullshit-free music scene...
I for one would love to say "I may have 10,000 songs on my drive, but the entire collection is 100% RIAA-free..."
Hmm, from the examples you give, it seems you're talking about web services, not.net per se.
If you really want to build web services, shouldn't you use the standards that are being developed? I'm talking about SOAP, UDDI, etc. Then there is healthy competition in implementing those standards, rather than the ole 'vendor lock-in'
Yeah, and actually you bring up a good point - you do need a site to coordinate things if people want to band together to fund projects.
Call it "aggregated patronage": I personally would like to see AbiWord add table support, but as a poor-ass college student I can't afford more than $10 torwards that goal, however, if there's 1000 others out there for whom table support is also worth $10, that's $10,000 right there.
Of course there would have to be a time constraint included, i.e. it's only worth even $10 to me if it happens before the beginning of next semester, or whatever...
But anyway, good luck with the site, and I hope you build this kind of functionality in there...
Hmm, I take it back; now that I think about it, maybe it does make sense to have a 'directory' site of these kinds of project, again mainly for advocacy reasons.
While I maintain it's probably not too hard to find someone to do the work without such a site, and that the project's mailing list is probably a better place to find help than a general purpose site, these sorts of transactions are invisible to all but the two parties involved (i.e. 'hirer' and hacker) - thus leaving no way to quantify this sort of activity.
Without such a quantification, it's very easy to FUD people that OSS is largely 'unsupported' software from a tech point of view, that as a programmer there's no money to be made from OSS, etc. Pointing to a site that says "$10,204 was paid last week for the following enhancements to the following projects..." would prove wrong the FUDers (Fudders?).
The thing is, it might even make more sense to post this info after the transaction took place, when the client is happy and the hacker has been paid. Also, including the identities of the two parties on the site (if they agree of course), would allow a [famous auction site]-style rating system to be implemented, i.e. I (the client) feel better about hiring Joe Hacker b/c I've seen the other paid hacks he's done listed here, and I (the hacker) feel better about doing this hack for the client, b/c I can see from their listing that they actually pay up when the work is done...
This simple rating system might work better than the complicated system of third-party judges they used to use at SourceXchange (if I'm not mistaken).
While something like this or SourceXchange is great for advertising the fact that there can be a paying market for OSS (i.e. advocacy reasons), is it really neccesary from a practical standpoint?
Sometime last year a company I was working for needed a new feature added to a high-profile OSS app before we could use it in our office, so we just emailed one of the developers and negotiated a rate - the task was quickly done and everyone was happy.
Bottom line: unlike the myriad layers of corporate bullshit that sit on top of the average proprietary software developer, most OSS developers are directly reachable - just grab their address from the project's mailing list and ask if they want to earn some $$$ fufilling your feature request... No fancy 'marketplace' site needed - the whole internet is the marketplace.
Got a problem with software from M$ or Macromedia or Adobe, etc.? Try calling the main switchboard and asking for the developer who coded that particular feature, so you can ask him about it... Yah...
I just tried it out, I really didn't see much of a qualitative difference between the two engines, at least for the few sample searches I tried - AllTheWeb just seemed to give me more results b/c it didn't "compress" mulitple entries from the same site, mailing list, etc.
Google by contrast tells me:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the XX already displayed
Which I actually find quite useful insofar as there's less repetitive crap to wade thru to find the result(s) you were looking for...
Having said that, I do agree that competition is a good thing, much as I swear by Google right now...
Re:A good argument for open source music
on
Mashed-Up Music
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· Score: 1
OK, you're right "free" is better, it's just confusing in English (hence, libre).
Having said that, for electronic music at least, you have MIDI which is in a sense, "source code"
A good argument for open source music
on
Mashed-Up Music
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· Score: 1
The quality of these homemade mixes and the ease with which they can now be made at home makes a good argument for releasing music under 'open source' music licenses.
Of course, I have to agree that it really is copyright infringement to do this with existing music, as long as you do anything with the result other than listening to it and playing it for your friends (i.e. fair use).
So what's needed is some progressive (in the open-minded not musical genre sense) artists out there willing to create groovy songs and/or snippets and release them under GPL-like terms. A whole scene could grow up around people endlessly mixing and remixing them together to create totally new tunes (which would of course then also have to be released under the same 'viral' terms of this license).
Of course this is not going to have the same popularity as remixing well known bands, but if enough of a scene were to grow up around this concept, there would be another great argument against these nasty "manditory digital-rights hardware" proposals the RIAA seems to love so much, as in "I only listen to 'free' music so there's no reason to taint my hard drive with your evil schemes."
The short answer is you don't. Open sourcing works great for generalized systems, the 'more eyeballs' maxim only holds when
there are more eyeballs, and you only get them when the system is generalized enough to be of interest to anyone besides you
and your client. True custom work should only contain your client's business logic (and maybe design) which as mentioned in
other posts above is not a good thing to open source for security and business IP reasons.
I myself do custom work for small businesses for a living. I'm a Java guy who's into open source, here's how I typically
work:
Gather requirements duh. You gotta find out what they really need, obviously. Not always clear, but that's part of
the job - translating their requirements on a business level into concrete development action.
Sell the Client on pre-existing OSS frameworks In my case, server-side web development w/ Java, this almost always
includes Tomcat. Not GPL'd, but hey, certainly better than the other, proprietary
crap. Lately I've been doing more involved projects, so I've been pushing JBoss as well, which _is_ GPL'd and frankly fantastic as well. I
try and run these on Linux w/ Apache if possible. I find this is not a hard sell - the main points being no licensing costs
for them, more stable tools than the proprietary solutions, etc. These are also popular well-known systems which always makes
business types feel better than unknown sketchy things.
Use pre-existing OSS libraries for the general parts For me this means class libraries - if I need logging I use
log4J, if I need XML processing I use Xerces, etc. (well bad examples since they're APL, not GPL, but you get the point). I also make this clear to the client, they usually like the idea as
it saves development time and thus their money. I also let them know that any code I write to improve these libraries goes
back to the project and is not the ownership of the client. This is also not a hard sell - my client doesn't care about
owning parts of a logging system, it's not his business. This is how I get to contribute to OSS on the client's dime.
Write the custom bits Given the above, all that's left is business logic and design. For me this means
incorporating the client's business logic in a bunch of servlets of EJBs, and their front end design into a JSP page or an
XSLT template. I typically give them full IP ownership of this - yes, I charge a higher rate b/c of this, and frankly this shit
is useless to me outside of the current project anyway.
Bottom line: if what you're coding for your client has general value and is thus worth open-sourcing, you're probably
reinventing the wheel which pegs you as a beginner in this business.
All swissmail.org offers is pop, smtp, and web via ssl. No TLS or any of the other things I outlined.
No TLS is true (although I don't know why that's necc. if they have SSL - care to enlighten me?). As for your other wishes, I think you're missing a few key points:
Allow you to forward your other email accounts to it - this would not be a function of swissmail, but rather the 'other' accounts - either they allow you to forward to outside address (like swissmail) or they don't - hehe - asking a provider to allow this function would be quite a feat - you really want swissmail to hack in to your company's mail server and reroute the mail to your swissmail account?
Allow you to send from a return email address of your other account (i.e. yourname@yourcompanyemail.com) - umm, just fill in that 'other' address as the 'reply-to' in your pop client - again not a function of the provider, in this case it's the function of your POP (or possibly IMAP) client
Fetchmail functions for automatic downloading of your other email accounts. - this may be the only (reasonable) function on your list they don't actually have - I'm not sure tho, maybe they do
A reasonable amount of disk storage - 'reasonable' is a very subjective term, n'est-ce pas? Swissmail's disk storage amounts are clearly stated on their site
The option to download your email for offline archiving - umm, doesn't POP handle that? I have mails deleted off the server when I pop them and my mail client automatically archives them after a set period of time
As I mentioned in an earlier
post Swissmail provides POP, IMAP and SMTP and Webmail thru SSL - also it seems like they do most of the other things you're looking for, but you'll have to
check for yourself...
Just so I understand, you use encrypted http requests to get mail on the road, so it will be secure.
Well, OK 'secure' is kind of a subjective term - what I mean is they have webmail thru SSL - i.e. https rather than http - Yahoo only provides http webmail AFAIK - anyone care to verify this?
But, the mail that you're retrieving was itself sent as cleartext(?) just minutes before.
Not sure I understand this comment - say someone sends me a mail from their desktop using an SSL enabled SMTP server:
the mail is encrypted from their desktop to their SMTP server
the relay from their SMTP server to swissmail's may or may not be encrypted (I honestly don't know how this is generally handled)
I use an SSL-enabled browser to read the mail via https from swissmail's webmail site - thus the message is again encrypted between that site and the browser I'm using to read it
If I reply or compose a new mail via the webmail interface, it is also encrypted between my browser and the webmail https server
For the same price that Yahoo's proposing (US$20/year) you can get a 'basic' account with
Swissmail - which gives you secure connections for POP, IMAP and SMTP. Secure webmail is available as well, which I use when I'm on the road.
I've been using it and find it to be quite nice...
... after checking out disinfo again and giving a closer read, I think I was mistaken about the 'juvenile' bit - I was reacting only to the 'cheerleader' piece which was indeed written by a teenager. I certainly don't agree with everything on the site, but I shouldn't have rushed to judgement...
I've checked out disinfo a couple of times before - occasionally interesting but overall gives the impression of being quite juvenile - is it because they're simply young, or is there a deeper geek-autism-PDD link here? I wonder sometimes...
Anyway, the 'Media Patrol' over at cursor.org is much more my cup of tea - it draws a lot on the mainstream press (American and foreign) but does so in a way to point out the deeper issues and expose the spin that major media puts on things.
Slashdot Mirror
What about a magic plugin that'll make IE's version of JavaScript behave like Firefox (i.e. DOM compliant)?
And so long as folks like me are around, anyone who tries to enforce breeding limits on their fellow citizens will find themselves the subject of a post-natal abortion right quick.
Well there tough-guy, I guess there just aren't enough "folks like you" living in China, where "breeding limits" most definitely are "enforced". But you probably believe they're all just a bunch of pinko pansies, not red-blooded he-men American "folks" like you...
1. OK, here's really what we need - a system like MusicBrainz that can go thru and automagically tag everysong on your disc.
2. And then interface with the RIAA Radar to identify specifically the RIAA stuff vs. which isn't.
3. Then MOVE that stuff out of my shared folder - I don't *want* to share it. Better yet MOVE it to the TRASH...
I like electronica and sometimes underground hiphop anyway- I can live without FSOL and Jay-Z and certainly would much rather share out people more deserving of my disk space and bandwidth...
I happen to be one of those who believe that sharing music is not 'theft' because it doesn't deprive _anyone_ of their ability to possess (listen to, enjoy, etc.) said music. It's only theft if you take something _away_, not merely copy it.
Still, I find it very interesting that those of us here on the 'dot make such an effort to make the above argument, over and over, with regards to music, but that there's not nearly so much springing to the defense when it's about software piracy.
Why is that? Is it because many of us code for a living and actually like the high salaries that come with employment as software creators?
Could be, but a more likely reason is the high percentage of Free Software-heads that hang out here - the reasoning being along the lines of "why would you pirate a bunch of proprietary crap when you can d/l for free far superior Free software?".
My point is, why isn't there a large percentage of posters here saying "this is irrelevant to me, I only have Free (as in speech) Music on my drive" in the same way that folks are only to happy to point out that their boxen are 100% M$-free?
My own theory is that it's due to the lack of Free Music available - there certainly is some, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall supply. One could argue that it's not always the best quality stuff, either...
What's the solution then? Maybe it's time for some serious advocacy, perhaps? Convincing your friends who play in a band to release their stuff under some sort of free license? Maybe we could take a collection to support artists who take this bold step? I know I'd rather give $20 to such a fund (per month!) than pay $18 for a single crappy CD (of which cents go to the artist of course). Call it "aggregated patronage" - if enough of us did that we could support a thriving bullshit-free music scene...
I for one would love to say "I may have 10,000 songs on my drive, but the entire collection is 100% RIAA-free..."
Hmm, from the examples you give, it seems you're talking about web services, not .net per se.
If you really want to build web services, shouldn't you use the standards that are being developed? I'm talking about SOAP, UDDI, etc. Then there is healthy competition in implementing those standards, rather than the ole 'vendor lock-in'
Yeah, and actually you bring up a good point - you do need a site to coordinate things if people want to band together to fund projects.
Call it "aggregated patronage": I personally would like to see AbiWord add table support, but as a poor-ass college student I can't afford more than $10 torwards that goal, however, if there's 1000 others out there for whom table support is also worth $10, that's $10,000 right there.
Of course there would have to be a time constraint included, i.e. it's only worth even $10 to me if it happens before the beginning of next semester, or whatever...
But anyway, good luck with the site, and I hope you build this kind of functionality in there...
Hmm, I take it back; now that I think about it, maybe it does make sense to have a 'directory' site of these kinds of project, again mainly for advocacy reasons.
While I maintain it's probably not too hard to find someone to do the work without such a site, and that the project's mailing list is probably a better place to find help than a general purpose site, these sorts of transactions are invisible to all but the two parties involved (i.e. 'hirer' and hacker) - thus leaving no way to quantify this sort of activity.
Without such a quantification, it's very easy to FUD people that OSS is largely 'unsupported' software from a tech point of view, that as a programmer there's no money to be made from OSS, etc. Pointing to a site that says "$10,204 was paid last week for the following enhancements to the following projects..." would prove wrong the FUDers (Fudders?).
The thing is, it might even make more sense to post this info after the transaction took place, when the client is happy and the hacker has been paid. Also, including the identities of the two parties on the site (if they agree of course), would allow a [famous auction site]-style rating system to be implemented, i.e. I (the client) feel better about hiring Joe Hacker b/c I've seen the other paid hacks he's done listed here, and I (the hacker) feel better about doing this hack for the client, b/c I can see from their listing that they actually pay up when the work is done...
This simple rating system might work better than the complicated system of third-party judges they used to use at SourceXchange (if I'm not mistaken).
While something like this or SourceXchange is great for advertising the fact that there can be a paying market for OSS (i.e. advocacy reasons), is it really neccesary from a practical standpoint?
Sometime last year a company I was working for needed a new feature added to a high-profile OSS app before we could use it in our office, so we just emailed one of the developers and negotiated a rate - the task was quickly done and everyone was happy.
Bottom line: unlike the myriad layers of corporate bullshit that sit on top of the average proprietary software developer, most OSS developers are directly reachable - just grab their address from the project's mailing list and ask if they want to earn some $$$ fufilling your feature request... No fancy 'marketplace' site needed - the whole internet is the marketplace.
Got a problem with software from M$ or Macromedia or Adobe, etc.? Try calling the main switchboard and asking for the developer who coded that particular feature, so you can ask him about it... Yah...
Google by contrast tells me:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the XX already displayed
Which I actually find quite useful insofar as there's less repetitive crap to wade thru to find the result(s) you were looking for...
Having said that, I do agree that competition is a good thing, much as I swear by Google right now...
Having said that, for electronic music at least, you have MIDI which is in a sense, "source code"
Of course, I have to agree that it really is copyright infringement to do this with existing music, as long as you do anything with the result other than listening to it and playing it for your friends (i.e. fair use).
So what's needed is some progressive (in the open-minded not musical genre sense) artists out there willing to create groovy songs and/or snippets and release them under GPL-like terms. A whole scene could grow up around people endlessly mixing and remixing them together to create totally new tunes (which would of course then also have to be released under the same 'viral' terms of this license).
Of course this is not going to have the same popularity as remixing well known bands, but if enough of a scene were to grow up around this concept, there would be another great argument against these nasty "manditory digital-rights hardware" proposals the RIAA seems to love so much, as in "I only listen to 'free' music so there's no reason to taint my hard drive with your evil schemes."
I myself do custom work for small businesses for a living. I'm a Java guy who's into open source, here's how I typically work:
- Gather requirements duh. You gotta find out what they really need, obviously. Not always clear, but that's part of
the job - translating their requirements on a business level into concrete development action.
- Sell the Client on pre-existing OSS frameworks In my case, server-side web development w/ Java, this almost always
includes Tomcat. Not GPL'd, but hey, certainly better than the other, proprietary
crap. Lately I've been doing more involved projects, so I've been pushing JBoss as well, which _is_ GPL'd and frankly fantastic as well. I
try and run these on Linux w/ Apache if possible. I find this is not a hard sell - the main points being no licensing costs
for them, more stable tools than the proprietary solutions, etc. These are also popular well-known systems which always makes
business types feel better than unknown sketchy things.
- Use pre-existing OSS libraries for the general parts For me this means class libraries - if I need logging I use
log4J, if I need XML processing I use Xerces, etc. (well bad examples since they're APL, not GPL, but you get the point). I also make this clear to the client, they usually like the idea as
it saves development time and thus their money. I also let them know that any code I write to improve these libraries goes
back to the project and is not the ownership of the client. This is also not a hard sell - my client doesn't care about
owning parts of a logging system, it's not his business. This is how I get to contribute to OSS on the client's dime.
- Write the custom bits Given the above, all that's left is business logic and design. For me this means
incorporating the client's business logic in a bunch of servlets of EJBs, and their front end design into a JSP page or an
XSLT template. I typically give them full IP ownership of this - yes, I charge a higher rate b/c of this, and frankly this shit
is useless to me outside of the current project anyway.
Bottom line: if what you're coding for your client has general value and is thus worth open-sourcing, you're probably reinventing the wheel which pegs you as a beginner in this business.In related news, a Candadian cyborg has fallen prey to stricter airline security checks...
No TLS is true (although I don't know why that's necc. if they have SSL - care to enlighten me?). As for your other wishes, I think you're missing a few key points:
As I mentioned in an earlier post Swissmail provides POP, IMAP and SMTP and Webmail thru SSL - also it seems like they do most of the other things you're looking for, but you'll have to check for yourself...
Well, OK 'secure' is kind of a subjective term - what I mean is they have webmail thru SSL - i.e. https rather than http - Yahoo only provides http webmail AFAIK - anyone care to verify this?
But, the mail that you're retrieving was itself sent as cleartext(?) just minutes before.
Not sure I understand this comment - say someone sends me a mail from their desktop using an SSL enabled SMTP server:
- the mail is encrypted from their desktop to their SMTP server
- the relay from their SMTP server to swissmail's may or may not be encrypted (I honestly don't know how this is generally handled)
- I use an SSL-enabled browser to read the mail via https from swissmail's webmail site - thus the message is again encrypted between that site and the browser I'm using to read it
- If I reply or compose a new mail via the webmail interface, it is also encrypted between my browser and the webmail https server
Does this make sense?I've been using it and find it to be quite nice...
* Microsoft continues to make new versions of windows: "Ack! Forced upgrades is a major reason you should switch to Linux!."
* Microsoft stops making new versions: "Ack! No more upgrades! This is insane. - you need to switch to Linux as fast as you possible can!"
I still recommend cursor.org tho'
Anyway, the 'Media Patrol' over at cursor.org is much more my cup of tea - it draws a lot on the mainstream press (American and foreign) but does so in a way to point out the deeper issues and expose the spin that major media puts on things.