It's called "fair use". Example: if I buy an album on 12" vinyl, and have no turntable, it is perfectly legal under fair use terms to get mp3s of it from the Internet.
Similarly, owning Sim City on 5 1/4 " floppy allows you to download that and play it.
Perhaps it works in a platform-independent way... maybe it submits requests in KaZaA / Gnutella / [whatever filesharing network]-speak, so that a Windows client could infect a Linux one just as easily as it was infected from a Mac solely by issuing weird protocol commands which would make the client do as the worm commanded - remember, searches are propogated through the filesharing networks exactly as worms spread, but as we like commiting copyright theft we don't complain about it.
Just a thought, if they're getting that much proliferation they can't be doing it using worms in the traditional sense of dodgy platform-specific programs...
Over here they deny all outbound connection attempts unless they're through a certain port, although the uni have opened up all the ports that they initally blocked that I've asked for (so I can use Jabber etc).
Last year they didn't block any outbound ports and people abused the network, slowed down to less than modem speed on occasion. It's better this way, because it stops the bandwith hogs transferring more data than their hard disk could ever hope to store and it means the net's guaranteed to be nippy when I'm googling my way through coursework!
Aye. I've "done coffee" once, (I'm at St. Andrews uni, the most upper-class twat filled place in existance) and I brought the average worth of the customers down by about twenty grand a year.
Mind you, someone did spill a café latté or whatever all over their nice new shoes... aww diddums, Daddy'll have to buy you a new pair!
MS wants control as it is the easiest way to make profits. MS are lazy, and they crave easy, hassle-free solutions to the problem of making more money. Controlling the Linux desktop software market would mean throttling one of it's revenue streams (Windows OS), and the non-Windows segment of the OS market is too small to stomach the massive price rises MS would need to put on Office to maintain their profits.
It's not going to happen, unless MS is forced to GPL Windows. Or WINE gets 100% app support... hey, I can dream, can't I?;=]
This is true for many, many people - I must have spent at least five hundred of your English pounds on music from bands I first heard over the Internet, and that's money I probably would have spent on beer if I didn't buy CDs.
Of course, most people don't listen to music - they just like the beat of a song and burn the album it's on from mp3s so they can have it in their car or whatever. The minority who actually care about music - and it IS a sizeable minority who spend billions a year - get really, REALLY annoyed with the low, low quality mp3s most people make (remember, kids: use LAME or ogg at 192kbps minimum) so they buy the studio-quality stuff. The record industry hates the high-quality mp3s you can get, as that's another reason not to give them your money.
Although giving the poeple who make the music I like money - even if via record companies - just seems the Right Thing to do. Vivé Amazon.co.uk!
I kept hearing that you were changing the name from Phoenix to something else. What happened?
That was just a giant publicity stunt. We've observed that in the past, the open-source community has instinctively favored David when big corporations complain of trademark infringement. We wanted to cash in on this sympathy by asking the community to send us money to fight the legal battle (obviously we'd really spend it on cool stuff), but with all the taxing issues and whatnot we decided to can the idea.
Uhhhh...really?
No, not really. This isn't like an action flick where the evil madman reveals the intricacies of his plans to hostages and then leaves them alone with a bomb set to detonate in like 10 hours. When we're ripping you off, we won't explain how in the FAQ. The truth is that we'd already had this 0.5 released planned for awhile, so it was okay to release under the Phoenix name. But under no circumstances will any future release be called Phoenix.
The OpenBeOS project were thinking about trying to make a new version of the BeBox, IIRC, and they were wanting the OS to be in the ROM so that it would boot like *that*. BeBoxen are almost as cool as Amigas. Almost.
It was in the newsletter a while ago, forget where they live though... come on karma whores, you know you want to link it!
Download this free Security Update! Protect yourself from Internet hackers who can steal your credit card and set fire to your house! Remain anonymous on the Internet! All we ask is that you allow the security software to send us your Internet Explorer history files, so we can monitor attacks against your privacy! Do it NOW before it's too late!
What struck me most about this car was that it was perfectly transparent in the visible wavelengths of light but in the infra-red, mere nanometers away from visible light, as visible as anything else.
Deep fried Mars Bars; haggis (which really IS a sheep stomach filled with horrible bits of sheep and not, as I delight in telling tourists, a small fluffy animal); porridge with salt and Tunnock's Teacakes.
Beam me up, Scotty. And if you insist on bringing the haggis, make sure it's already out of the sheep this time!
Will there be any OpenSourced hardware for these things to run on?
Think about it: all I hear the OpenSource monkeys chatering about is OpenSource software (from Linux kernels and KDE to bare-metal stuff like this). All the hardware these things run on is just as proprietary as Windows XP.
Now, while you can unscrew the case and have a peer inside (much as true programming gurus can see what a program does by doing cat/bin/ls | less ) you can't see what hardware bugs exist except by inferring their existance from their effects. Why don't people start designing open-source CPUs, chipsets etc?
Of course, as there aren't all that many chip fabrication plants around we will have to rely on Intel and friends (enemies ?) taking the GPL/BSD/MIT/insert favourite licence here chip designs, making them and flogging them for loads (captive market, y'see. "Here is the chip design, you want this in Socket 468 format give us three hundred dollars". I think that the GPL allows that). I'm not all that sure how these licences would apply to chip designs but still. There must be some chip design geniuses out there who aren't employed by AMD and by making a few chip designs GPLd they could change the way the computing world operates. And get a high-paying job out of it as well;-). It would mean an end to Pentium F00F-style bugs, at least...
Just a few thoughts, I doubt it will ever happen but still...
The point to this post was that mp3s will not be replacing conventional music sales for a long while, at least if I have anything to do with it. Replies to comments:
People like appreciating art as well, providing it satisfies their arbritrary definition of "good" art, and they are willing to pay for the privilige. They also like bringing "new" art up from the underground, so they can boast about it later.
The only live music to be had without me saying goodbye to a day travelling consists of a load of unskilled schoolkids in Weezer cover bands.
I have a fat unmetered broadband pipe to my PC. I can download entire albums in the tiume it takes me to fix a coffee. Yet I still buy three or four CDs a month. Why?
I'll tell you why.
1) CDs sound better. Most Internet monkeys can not encode mp3s to save themselves. My sound setup cost me a bomb so I can tell the difference between 192kbps and the CD itself.
2) CDs are not just music. Some album sleeves are works of art in their own right (e.g. Tool - Lateralus). There is also an assosciated boast factor in having proper CDs compared to home-burnt ones - like the difference between a beige box and a Cooler Master. There are subtle physical differences, but the Cooler Master owner is infinently cooler than Mr. Beige. And that's partly why he bought it.
3) If I didn't buy CDs, the artists would stop making music.
Even if I'm talking about purchasing demos straight from the bands themselves. Giving the band my money, no matter how indirectly, helps ensure that they will continue to make music in the future.
Hint: go get CDex and use the LAME encoder at 192kbps (or make it vorbis). All my CDs are ripped like that, and my WinAmp list all sounds great.
...just like the way other developers release their code under an open-source licence after a set time, only that they're announcing their intent before they sell bucketloads?
Yes. I use Phoenix on my proper PC as it allows me to use most of my screen space for browsing. From the top down I've got: the topbar, the menubar, the tab-bar (tabar?), what I'm looking at, the bottom of the screen.
The tabar would be redundant on mobiles as well, as who's going to do more than just read the news or mail on a mobile?
Of course, if a similar solution was to be implemented on mobiles you would have to require that the users learn the mouse gestures or something. And considering what technology imbeciles most users are, that's not going to happen. Again, the massed incompetance of people using technology gets in the way of the technology being efficent to use.
And I don't buy that "technology should be easy to use in the first instance" argument. It's like saying you should be able to drive cars from the first second you're strapped into the driver's seat. If people in general were willing to spend an hour or two (phones are MUCH easier to use than cars are. How many drving lessons did YOU need?) learning how something new works they would save more time than that in a week, never mind a year.
Scottish university, I mean. £50 a year for a Uni lan connection that is wince-inducingly fast (100Mbps burst maximum, I'm often getting four megaBYTES a second through it).
Admittedtly, it is firewalled into submission to prevent "abuse", but it's easy enough to counter by getting people to listen to things on sockets 25, 21 and 80...
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It's called "fair use". Example: if I buy an album on 12" vinyl, and have no turntable, it is perfectly legal under fair use terms to get mp3s of it from the Internet.
Similarly, owning Sim City on 5 1/4 " floppy allows you to download that and play it.
-Mark
Perhaps it works in a platform-independent way... maybe it submits requests in KaZaA / Gnutella / [whatever filesharing network]-speak, so that a Windows client could infect a Linux one just as easily as it was infected from a Mac solely by issuing weird protocol commands which would make the client do as the worm commanded - remember, searches are propogated through the filesharing networks exactly as worms spread, but as we like commiting copyright theft we don't complain about it.
Just a thought, if they're getting that much proliferation they can't be doing it using worms in the traditional sense of dodgy platform-specific programs...
-Mark
Over here they deny all outbound connection attempts unless they're through a certain port, although the uni have opened up all the ports that they initally blocked that I've asked for (so I can use Jabber etc).
Last year they didn't block any outbound ports and people abused the network, slowed down to less than modem speed on occasion. It's better this way, because it stops the bandwith hogs transferring more data than their hard disk could ever hope to store and it means the net's guaranteed to be nippy when I'm googling my way through coursework!
-Mark
That would be what is known as the "obvious" solution, that is why. When was the last time one of those was implemented?
Actually, that was when you had to click the start button to turn your PC off.
-Mark
Aye. I've "done coffee" once, (I'm at St. Andrews uni, the most upper-class twat filled place in existance) and I brought the average worth of the customers down by about twenty grand a year.
Mind you, someone did spill a café latté or whatever all over their nice new shoes... aww diddums, Daddy'll have to buy you a new pair!
-Mark
You violated the patent! Run! While you still can! They're coming to take your house and sell it on the Amazon marketplace!
...on me within five years. 'Nuff said, methinks. Don't use IDE hard-discs as a backup medium. It's just... wrong.
-Mark
MS wants control as it is the easiest way to make profits. MS are lazy, and they crave easy, hassle-free solutions to the problem of making more money. Controlling the Linux desktop software market would mean throttling one of it's revenue streams (Windows OS), and the non-Windows segment of the OS market is too small to stomach the massive price rises MS would need to put on Office to maintain their profits.
;=]
It's not going to happen, unless MS is forced to GPL Windows. Or WINE gets 100% app support... hey, I can dream, can't I?
-Mark
This is true for many, many people - I must have spent at least five hundred of your English pounds on music from bands I first heard over the Internet, and that's money I probably would have spent on beer if I didn't buy CDs.
Of course, most people don't listen to music - they just like the beat of a song and burn the album it's on from mp3s so they can have it in their car or whatever. The minority who actually care about music - and it IS a sizeable minority who spend billions a year - get really, REALLY annoyed with the low, low quality mp3s most people make (remember, kids: use LAME or ogg at 192kbps minimum) so they buy the studio-quality stuff. The record industry hates the high-quality mp3s you can get, as that's another reason not to give them your money.
Although giving the poeple who make the music I like money - even if via record companies - just seems the Right Thing to do. Vivé Amazon.co.uk!
-Mark
From the phoenix site:
I kept hearing that you were changing the name from Phoenix to something else. What happened?
That was just a giant publicity stunt. We've observed that in the past, the open-source community has instinctively favored David when big corporations complain of trademark infringement. We wanted to cash in on this sympathy by asking the community to send us money to fight the legal battle (obviously we'd really spend it on cool stuff), but with all the taxing issues and whatnot we decided to can the idea.
Uhhhh...really?
No, not really. This isn't like an action flick where the evil madman reveals the intricacies of his plans to hostages and then leaves them alone with a bomb set to detonate in like 10 hours. When we're ripping you off, we won't explain how in the FAQ. The truth is that we'd already had this 0.5 released planned for awhile, so it was okay to release under the Phoenix name. But under no circumstances will any future release be called Phoenix.
-Mark
It was designed for the BeOS, which was itself fast, lightweight and clean, so what did you expect?
OK, neither were fully-featured but they did everything 75% of people would ever need.
-Mark
The OpenBeOS project were thinking about trying to make a new version of the BeBox, IIRC, and they were wanting the OS to be in the ROM so that it would boot like *that*. BeBoxen are almost as cool as Amigas. Almost.
It was in the newsletter a while ago, forget where they live though... come on karma whores, you know you want to link it!
-Mark
Wonder what kind of science he was doing...
Perhaps all the talk about "fluid interchange" was a bit too much for him to handle in a mature manner...
-Mark
Download this free Security Update! Protect yourself from Internet hackers who can steal your credit card and set fire to your house! Remain anonymous on the Internet! All we ask is that you allow the security software to send us your Internet Explorer history files, so we can monitor attacks against your privacy! Do it NOW before it's too late!
-Mark
What struck me most about this car was that it was perfectly transparent in the visible wavelengths of light but in the infra-red, mere nanometers away from visible light, as visible as anything else.
Rather like Enron's accounts, then...
-Mark
"One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
It all depends on your perspective. Give it a while and we'll see what the true ramifications are.
-Mark
Hmm... I'm a Scot, and let me see what we have:
Deep fried Mars Bars; haggis (which really IS a sheep stomach filled with horrible bits of sheep and not, as I delight in telling tourists, a small fluffy animal); porridge with salt and Tunnock's Teacakes.
Beam me up, Scotty. And if you insist on bringing the haggis, make sure it's already out of the sheep this time!
-Mark
Will there be any OpenSourced hardware for these things to run on?
/bin/ls | less ) you can't see what hardware bugs exist except by inferring their existance from their effects. Why don't people start designing open-source CPUs, chipsets etc?
;-). It would mean an end to Pentium F00F-style bugs, at least...
Think about it: all I hear the OpenSource monkeys chatering about is OpenSource software (from Linux kernels and KDE to bare-metal stuff like this). All the hardware these things run on is just as proprietary as Windows XP.
Now, while you can unscrew the case and have a peer inside (much as true programming gurus can see what a program does by doing cat
Of course, as there aren't all that many chip fabrication plants around we will have to rely on Intel and friends (enemies ?) taking the GPL/BSD/MIT/insert favourite licence here chip designs, making them and flogging them for loads (captive market, y'see. "Here is the chip design, you want this in Socket 468 format give us three hundred dollars". I think that the GPL allows that). I'm not all that sure how these licences would apply to chip designs but still. There must be some chip design geniuses out there who aren't employed by AMD and by making a few chip designs GPLd they could change the way the computing world operates. And get a high-paying job out of it as well
Just a few thoughts, I doubt it will ever happen but still...
-Mark
The point to this post was that mp3s will not be replacing conventional music sales for a long while, at least if I have anything to do with it. Replies to comments:
People like appreciating art as well, providing it satisfies their arbritrary definition of "good" art, and they are willing to pay for the privilige. They also like bringing "new" art up from the underground, so they can boast about it later.
The only live music to be had without me saying goodbye to a day travelling consists of a load of unskilled schoolkids in Weezer cover bands.
-Mark
I have a fat unmetered broadband pipe to my PC. I can download entire albums in the tiume it takes me to fix a coffee. Yet I still buy three or four CDs a month. Why?
I'll tell you why.
1) CDs sound better.
Most Internet monkeys can not encode mp3s to save themselves. My sound setup cost me a bomb so I can tell the difference between 192kbps and the CD itself.
2) CDs are not just music.
Some album sleeves are works of art in their own right (e.g. Tool - Lateralus). There is also an assosciated boast factor in having proper CDs compared to home-burnt ones - like the difference between a beige box and a Cooler Master. There are subtle physical differences, but the Cooler Master owner is infinently cooler than Mr. Beige. And that's partly why he bought it.
3) If I didn't buy CDs, the artists would stop making music.
Even if I'm talking about purchasing demos straight from the bands themselves. Giving the band my money, no matter how indirectly, helps ensure that they will continue to make music in the future.
Hint: go get CDex and use the LAME encoder at 192kbps (or make it vorbis). All my CDs are ripped like that, and my WinAmp list all sounds great.
-Mark
I can imagine the following scene: just before xconfig launches properly, we get the following:
--> insert generic "PayPal - Donate!" image here, and the sound of a thousand keyboards typing, "NO, you suckers! All this for free!" <--
...just like the way other developers release their code under an open-source licence after a set time, only that they're announcing their intent before they sell bucketloads?
Example: id software and Doom.
Why on Earth does everything
Yes. I use Phoenix on my proper PC as it allows me to use most of my screen space for browsing. From the top down I've got: the topbar, the menubar, the tab-bar (tabar?), what I'm looking at, the bottom of the screen.
The tabar would be redundant on mobiles as well, as who's going to do more than just read the news or mail on a mobile?
Of course, if a similar solution was to be implemented on mobiles you would have to require that the users learn the mouse gestures or something. And considering what technology imbeciles most users are, that's not going to happen. Again, the massed incompetance of people using technology gets in the way of the technology being efficent to use.
And I don't buy that "technology should be easy to use in the first instance" argument. It's like saying you should be able to drive cars from the first second you're strapped into the driver's seat. If people in general were willing to spend an hour or two (phones are MUCH easier to use than cars are. How many drving lessons did YOU need?) learning how something new works they would save more time than that in a week, never mind a year.
-Mark
Scottish university, I mean. £50 a year for a Uni lan connection that is wince-inducingly fast (100Mbps burst maximum, I'm often getting four megaBYTES a second through it).
Admittedtly, it is firewalled into submission to prevent "abuse", but it's easy enough to counter by getting people to listen to things on sockets 25, 21 and 80...