If I'd said, "Hey, man, get me a _knife_ okay? 'Cause I want to STAB somebody, okay? Get me a knife 'cause there's this guy I don't like and if you give me a knife I'll stab him and remove his entrails and loop them decoratively around his neck, okay?" then yeah, sure:) If I wanted it for chopping vegetables for Thanksgiving stuffing and that was my story, then unless I was acting really unstable I doubt you'd be blamed, but if I was totally set on stabbing somebody and knowing this you gave me the knife anyway, you're an idiot, you had the option and cause to refuse (hey, you're the one with the knife) and so (unless you had me at gunpoint or something) you certainly should be blamed. You'll find that disclaiming all responsibility for your actions has only limited usefulness in the real world:)
It's very interesting to read the replies to this article. It appears that every single person reading it sees only what they want to see in it, and that this effect even overcomes Katz's usual capacity to annoy. People are talking about what they think he said without even noticing sentences like:
"Much of this legislation is being initiated by companies, not members of congress who have, until now, been happy to view the Net from a wary distance, enacting the occasional, unworkable and totally decency act to keep up appearances."
It appears that while Jon's paragraph length is steadily regressing to a disturbingly childish level, a Hemingway-like stream of very short semi-related sentences, his grasp on the sentences is simultaneously weakening. The sentence cited above is incomprehensible until you realise Jon meant to put a word between 'totally' and 'decency'- my guess is that he meant to use something like 'unnecessary', perhaps something stronger. What does it say about Slashdot that people are willing to take this as insight and inspiration? It's rather disturbing. One would like to believe that slashdot geeks have minds analytical enough to make reasonable value judgements, yet it seems that many are willing to draw inspiration from extremely nebulous and woolly talk, even willing to suggest that the person responsible for this vague talk is observant or wise. It's rather like deriving insight from emacs' Doctor mode: Jon is not having any ideas, and his ability to summarize and explain the old ideas he's using is weakening. The sheer wandering, centerless quality of his output raises questions of whether he is well: most people's thought processes are not so disconnected. Now that I've said that, anyone is welcome to mark it flamebait 20,000 times until your mouse drops off. I don't mind being 'censored', I just wished to say my piece, particularly since people were citing this article as something _better_ than most Katz articles, when in fact it is simply _vaguer_... shockingly vaguer, in fact. How much farther can this go before Slashdot notices- or before Jon Katz needs help? There comes a point where the writing tells a pathological story as well as a literary story. If Jon posted an essay in which every other sentence left out a key word, would people consider that grounds for his needing a medical checkup? I do agree that writing an essay to be read publically by large numbers of people and leaving out a key word in _one_ sentence is merely evidence of sloppiness, though it does raise the issue of where that word went: what happened between the brain and the hands and the eyes that he didn't spot that? It helps nobody if Jon Katz has some sort of breakdown and begins posting greatly deteriorated essays to slashdot- even if the subjects he picks are those that slashdotters can talk interestingly about.
Ok... (inspired by my day :) )
on
Geeks vs. Nerds
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· Score: 2
"We're geeks, and you'll pay us to talk over your head!" *g* Inspired by being paid $75 an hour to grovel through a guy's web pages explaining, experimenting and going "Well. That's interesting. The reason that didn't work is because..." (though actually we spent 3 hours at it and I only billed for the one we originally planned on)
In the ideal KDE environment, what percentage of user input is expected to be:
Selecting menu entries, popup or root or Start
Entering text in text entry areas
Clicking a small button with an icon on it
Clicking a larger button with text on it
Radio buttons, checkboxes, listboxes
Keyboard shortcuts (combinations like meta-*)
Editing a dotfile
Which of these control types need to be made the sole control for a type of functionality? (i.e. you tend not to have text input that can also be done by 27 radio buttons for each letter, but often icon buttons _are_ doubled by menu items, sometimes with a keyboard shortcut also available.) Which if any do you feel represents the preferred KDE method of doing things, and which if any are discouraged?
I don't _use_ Windows: I'm typing this from a Mac- and MS still found ways to harm me. They systematically exterminated all the software companies they could and did everything they could to ensure that nobody would write software for anything but _their_ operating system. This _is_ covered in the findings of fact as one of the types of damage they inflicted. They did this so well that _your_ instinctive reaction is to behave like there is no software for anything else. That's how close they came to scorching the earth for the entire computer industry, and I can name off a long list of products which didn't really have to be Windows-only. I can quite legitimately blame Bill Gates for screwing up the market for Mac software, or indeed for Linux software or Be software: it's all the same argument, by abusing their monopoly they screwed up the normal operation of the free market. The FoF covers this, and the drying up of alternatives is considered one of the most subtly harmful results of the abuse of monopoly.
...reading geeky humor:) My personal favorite is the obscure MPW compiler messages: note the secret The WHO reference! http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/PR- MPW.html "a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program" "This array has no size, and that's bad" "Call me paranoid but finding `/*' inside this comment makes me suspicious" "Huh ?" (and many more)
The deal is this: if MS are sane, then they will settle. However, it's not a foregone conclusion that MS _are_ sane: some of their behavior in the case seemed delusional, and apparently the company is now fighting desperately to keep its own employees from 'losing faith' and believing in things like the findings of fact. I'd say there was a very good chance that the Microsoft side will go down fighting, simply because they are quite seriously insane when compared to the standard of sanity set by judges and juries and normal people. In this sense they don't know what's good for them because they will not entertain the idea that they might have done anything wrong: when the leadership of a company is that strong and that determined to stick with a course of action, they may decide that no judge is qualified to pass judgement on them. They're being asked to accept as fact that they've done many harmful things, and it may be a lot to ask to expect these people to admit they've done wrong. Don't always assume the MS leadership are perfectly sane rationalists. They are considerably more passionate and fanatical than that.
I say they split into office apps, consumer apps, MSN/MSNBC/whatever else they've bought that's media, W2K _and_ _Millenium_. Even if nobody gets access to source code, and there's no serious damages, this is the structure we need, based on the following facts:
Windows 9* is junky, but insanely prevalent
Windows 9* runs on older computers and runs more games and software than NT/W2K
NT/W2K is not as junky as 9*, but is a lot more expensive and is geared (supposedly) for big iron, or at least as near big iron as PCs ever get
NT/W2K is much less cooperative about running on junky hardware, and won't run anywhere near as much software, particularly games, particularly legacy games that make assumptions about having direct access to hardware
See the pattern here? It may or may not be difficult to compete with W2K in the server market, what with PHBs getting sold on creative benchmarking- but it would not be hard for a 'W95 forever!' sort of product to do great against it in the consumer market, merrily thriving in a chaos of confusion and muddled old junky hardware. At the same time, W95 is junky enough that it's reasonable for other consumer OSes to arise as alternatives (Macintosh is definitely best positioned, but why shouldn't there be others, ones that run on PC hardware?). On the flip side, W95 couldn't possibly compete with W2K on the server side- but without the money from a locked-in _consumer_ monopoly to prop it up, the Windows Server company would have to really work hard to avoid being overcome by Solaris on the high end, Linux on the low end, BSD all over, etc etc. And the best part is: by being redefined as specifically a server OS, NT would suddenly not have to incorporate all sorts of gamer junk and bloat itself with consumer crud in efforts to eventually take over from 95/98: it'd be able to start competing more _effectively_, albeit at a higher price than its already high price- but it might actually become fairly _good_ and worthy of respect if it's not being molded into the next consumer OS. Seriously: the _most_ important split anyone could structurally make would be consumer/professional, on the OS itself. Yes, the Windows 95 legacy is garbage: but THAT is what the monopoly is mostly built of, and a company made to do specifically maintenance of the Windows 95/98/Millenium legacy would be a heck of a profitable operation. Lots of old and current PCs would remain in service running it for years- it'd never get stable or reliable, but so what? Gradually alternatives would arise without obliterating 9* as a nice standardised consumer platform. Hell, Microsoft's _current_ plans, to eventually transition all Windows users to W2K someday, would cause more damage to the industry than this.
I'm not sure whether to be pleased or insulted that my arguments are so memorable to top KDE people without having them actually convice said top KDE people;) ("insulted!";) ) It _is_ a matter of thinking. And yes, I _have_ tried both KDE and Gnome. KDE let me log onto the net using kppp before I'd even sorted out pppd. I owe KDE lasting thanks for being an important part of my Linux adoption process. That said, you're completely, stubbornly wrong about your assumption that it's all just a matter of habits. That's a crock: it's also both uneducated and insulting that you're claiming I hated KDE simply because it was unfamiliar- if that is the case, why did I enjoy bash? My objections to _BOTH_ KDE and Gnome are simply that they attempt to do desktop interface _badly_. They bring nothing new and make little or no effort to actually present a consistent, predictable visual 'picture' of the computer. In fairness, I will point out one of the major points that always leads me to this conclusion- I have never seen _any_ file manager, other than the MacOS Finder, that behaves as though the user's placement of an icon or object is in any way significant or worthy of notice. It's always 'and now we sort everything and line it up in neat rows, because we can'. I _realise_ that's what everybody but MacOS does, but can't you see that it screws up people's orientation? That's not how a desk behaves. On a desk, you put stuff down and it stays where you put it- witness the cluttered workbenches of a thousand techies all over the world. If someone came in and organised everything alphabetically, they would be _lost_. Why do you and just about every other GUI maker insist on taking control of the graphical objects and reshuffling them? To add to this, you may well do better than most X developers (particularly singling out the GNU developers, who should know better!) at providing keyboard shortcuts to operations. However, you seem to not have a clue as to how prevalent and consistent this is in the environment I'm talking about- it really loses you credibility to claim that my switching to KDE and doing everything that way is merely a matter of habit. You don't seem to know what you're talking about... so you insist, repeatedly, that it's just a matter of my being personally prejudiced against your way of doing things, which you maintain is not merely comparable but equal. Do you have _any_ _idea_ of how many millions of dollars a company like Apple spent on human interface design? On how many hundreds of hours designers like Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini spent designing and testing and working to make these things sensible and usable? Have you actually read the work of others in this area? Hell, you could read _Microsoft_ Human Interface Guidelines- they don't obey their own rules, but they too have put the effort into this area, and that's for just one reason: it's not just a matter of what people are used to, there are actual rights and wrongs involved. I don't care if you say 'I personally believe your mac is probably better in usability'. I am saying this: as somebody who is concerned with human interface design, I would like to see you making less assumptions. Yes, the world is heavily biased (polluted?) due to the vast numbers of people who have been extensively taught Windows HI rules. Yes, I personally am out in left field using a Mac but espousing purely CLI human interface guidelines, something I haven't even really begun to properly develop on a large scale. Still, every time (and it's been several times, hasn't it?) I see you come back at a critisism with 'That's just your habits speaking, there's no difference so just try it and lose your other habits', I cringe. You CAN'T learn anything if you deny there's anything to learn. KDE is ill served by those assumptions. Keep them if you must- I choose to challenge them.
That capacity to reduce diversity to a single monoculture is the _main_ reason Windows viruses are so nasty. It's the reason most Windows people are using one particular interface that is jack of all trades, master of none. It is not a good thing at all. The only reason people think it's a good thing is because until recently there has been no evidence to suggest you could survive doing anything else. Hence, the emotional reaction is 'we must all do this or die!'. First of all, Linux is still around without doing that (and indeed growing, and indeed there are still other options neither Windows nor Linux), and secondly, this assumption was formed from observing a monopoly at the top of its form and making every effort to kill off everything resembling 'diversity'. If even this has not made the 'monoculture', everybody-runs-Windows approach safe and beneficial to all, what good would it be to try and make Linux a monoculture, with all the disadvantages it brings, but with none of the ability to exert corporate power and influence and throw around huge sums of money? Seriously. That'd be a _phenomenally_ bad tactical move.
A lot of Apple _users_ have been Anti-Microsoft. Apple itself is not antimicrosoft- however, Apple has been an ALTERNATIVE to Microsoft for a very long time. And, indeed, that's something to appreciate. Alternatives are good...
I boot _MacOS_ for that sort of thing. Linux offers me things that I CANNOT get from MacOS or Windows, in a million years, not in Jobs and Gates' wildest dreams. At this time, mostly what it offers me is an escape hatch. I am typing this in MacOS, from which I've been reading interesting news such as the fact that newer MacOSes are bringing in auto-update behaviors that are the antithesis of what I can tolerate on my computer. I don't think either KDE or Gnome are remotely comparable to MacOS for usability. I don't _ask_ Linux to be as usable as what I pay for with MacOS. Instead I ask different things of Linux: first, I ask that it be there if I need it, and second, I ask it to be something I can completely control and audit, the power to reconfigure the system being in _my_ hands- lastly, I ask it to not forget this, but I am thankful that the nature of Linux is to preserve areas of difference and iconoclasm where I'd be able to settle. I dispute that a desktop environment adds functionality. I _totally_ dispute that. I use one every day in MacOS and I still dispute that claim... what's happening is that the desktop environment is _attempting_ to provide _other_ _interfaces_ to data and ideas that might otherwise have to be jotted down as notes or interacted with by words and sentences. This is a far cry from providing _added_ functionality. Particularly with the Windows paradigm, it's actually a loss of functionality in many ways- the attempts at other interfaces end up so strange and convoluted that the 'visual' environment has more unwritten rules than the old CLI environments had. This all must be memorized, just as CLI rules were: another nasty gotcha is the tendency to assume that the GUI approach is inherently so 'intuitive' that controls and objects can be strewn around and reshuffled arbitrarily. These new desktop environments are not remotely new- they are simply implementations of 'the other paradigm' in computer interaction. First there was language-based interaction, and 'talking' to the computer with words, commands, and remembering what it said in reply. Then there was the graphic-based interaction, which was originally intended to convey the sense of a logical, consistent environment like a physical object such as a desk, 'mapping' to direct physical manipulation of realworld objects, and operating on specific rules worked out in advance. ...er, things didn't exactly work out that way...
You've made a point _nobody_ seems to make, and it's the most important one: the fact of Unix heterogenity (sp?). This is so often treated as a criticism, when the reality is that it's a powerful safety feature in a world where computer systems are vulnerable to infections and 'sickness'. I dualboot LinuxPPC (not terribly often, but I insist on being able to do it). This means that there are some Linux software packages that I can't, actually run, because anything that's binary-only or depends on PC hardware is something I can't run. For instance, anything that expects a parallel port is likewise something I can't use. Contrariwise, if someone makes a Linux binary that is a x86 virus, I can't run it either (nor would I want to). There's a level of inconvenience that is also protection. Add to this the fact that I like to not run a desktop such as KDE or Gnome, and mostly hack around with console apps and play with Window Maker when I _do_ boot into Linux, and it becomes extremely awkward for someone to make a generic Linux virus that can function under those conditions. I end up making a relentlessly nonstandard environment for myself, simply because Linux does _not_ deliver a very well realised and completed user environment, and because it encourages my active involvement in the building of this user environment. This diversity is a strength, not a weakness: it makes it appallingly difficult for a commercial vendor to target the average Linux system (they will have to pick RH or something and support only that), but it also makes it appallingly difficult for a virus writer to target the average Linux system (again, they will have to pick the RH or something and 'support' only that...) The most significant effects of this are as follows:
Commercial 'Winux' offerings will overwhelmingly focus their efforts into a single dist, probably Red Hat, possibly Caldera or Corel or something. Divergent dists and installations will not be supported- with varying degrees of haughtiness.
Because Linux is in fact poorly suited to being turned into a Windows clone (much of the advantages are wasted), a very _large_ percentage of the userbase will refuse to be homogenized, _much_ larger than the comparable percentage of Windows or Mac users running substantially unusual configurations. This will continue, emphasised by the ability to distribute and publicise novel experiments in interface and user environment.
Because of this, Linux will continue to seemingly be penalized in comparison with, for instance, Windows, as a developer's platform and commercial target platform- the commercial Linux distributions will infight and intentionally foster conflicts with each other, and too many users will drastically alter their user environments to make distribution of generic Linux software easy. Some vendors will define really limited targets, others will attempt to issue zillions of patches and diffs to cover the widest area possible. These approaches will coexist. When Linux virii _do_ become a significant force, the commercial Linux distributions will be the ones taking the hit, and such attacks will be specific to individual releases of commercial distributions.
At this time, at least _some_ people will have the presence of mind to suggest the obvious: there is choice, change to a different sort of Linux that is not vulnerable. No single Linux distributor will have the leverage to be able to significantly eliminate other dists (though certain ones may be able to get very large percentages of marketshare simply through commercial distribution networks and the ability to make the Linux versions of 'AOL disks' and proliferate them)
So, the 'Linux virus' _will_ exist, but it's important to understand the context they will exist in. They will be targeting the passive consumers and the largest commercial vendors- anytime you have a single voice outshouting the chorus, you'll have the Linux virus targetted to that particular distribution, perhaps motivated by anger at some business decisions the company makes that violate unwritten or written rules, perhaps simply taking advantage of sloppiness.
Tony Hancock, Max Linder, Mark Sheridan, T. E. Dunville, the French clown Marceline, Freddie Prinze... that's not counting attempted suicides and drug and alcohol abuse (many others). It's like black-lung for coal miners: black-spirit for comedians. It's daunting. One cannot protect some types of artists- they remain vulnerable and you can only wish them well and do what you can to not overload them, knowing that much of the world will not be so forgiving, and even if it was, it still might not help... In conclusion, I'd just like to say, "Suicide is baaaad, mmkay?";P *heh*
Not mine: I run system 8.1. However, the new version of Sherlock (impressive search tool) does network activity without asking and tries to update its plugins, MS apps try to autoupdate and there are other system software components that try to autoupdate. That's where I get off, frankly: I _will_ _not_ go along with that. If that means I run system 8 until it can't be usefully used and then go with Linux, so be it: it's absolutely true that it's an exploitable feature, but what you are not acknowledging is how unhealthy it can be even WITHOUT virii being installed. Supposing all the Lotus Notes users had NT autoupdate the NT fixpack that 'happened to' kill Lotus Notes? This whole scenario _might_ be permissible if all commercial developers were responsible and did extensive compatibility testing (HA!), but as things are, it's a recipe for rapidly losing control of your machine, not knowing why it's increasingly broken, and not having the power to even fix it, even if you know all kinds of things about the machine and can debug the installation and troubleshoot it infallibly. We're talking sort of plug and play hassle at the software level- instead of cards fighting you every step of the way, it's the potential for software itself to get into fights with other software, and every time you turn around something downloaded an update which turns out to break something else. That's an absolute nightmare waiting to happen, and as I said, I could easily see it driving me to Linux fulltime in the long run if people don't STOP trying to do this insane behavior. Auto update assumes that the newer a version or update is, the better. Almost any computer user can identify cases where the opposite is true. I was forced to stop using iCab and return to Netscape _because_ newer versions became hopeless crashfests- and I'm not using a newer version of Netscape, either, I'm using a particular version that seemed to like my machine more than usual. And it only takes _one_ autoupdate to a broken or conflicting application to hose you- in the case of system software or always-resident software, it can cripple you entirely.
The two have some very strong similarities. Primarily, they both thirsted for power on a very large scale. Hitler wanted to rule for 'a thousand years', where Gates wanted to run MS software on 'every computer'. In both cases, they accumulated people around them which magnified their arrogance and destructiveness. Hitler was filled with vengefulness towards the world due to the Versailles Treaty, and his main thesis was getting revenge for that 'insult' to the German people, and indeed the treaty was a great blow to German pride and helped create conditions for the Third Reich. Gates was filled with vengefulness towards the world due to his Altair Basic tapes being wildly pirated, and his main theme was getting revenge for that 'insult' by never letting anyone 'steal' from him again, by making his software so necessary that he could never again be treated as just another hacker to take ideas from. Gates wanted control, and to punish the 'hacker', and indeed nobody'd asked his permission or opinion on the copying of his port of Basic: the hackers 'liberated' it instead, enraging Gates and setting the tone for his style of technology, always centralising control of the software somewhere other than the computer user, a path of vengeance that continues to this day, and colors all of Microsoft's technological developments right down to the ideas for 'Office on the Web'. Honestly, when you look at the two men in terms of being driven by vengeance and hunger for power and control, they are very similar indeed. They even generate comparable 'reality distortion fields', in that their vengeances are so fierce that neither was an uncomplicatedly charismatic leader: in both cases the man was compelling but alarming at the same time, causing a polarisation between the hardcore devotees ('brownshirts' and 'microsofties') and others who would be disconcerted by the ferocity of the movement and try, fatally, to be quiet and hope things would settle down. There are profound and fascinating parallels between the men and their movements, and to deny this is foolish and shortsighted. Microsoft is far too recent to expect these things can be discussed sensibly- they will never be discussed dispassionately, because on the one hand mass murder and Master Race theorising, and on the other hand crushing of all choice and Industry Standard theorising, are ugly things, and it's shocking to consider what each concept means and how far the respective movements were willing to take their viewpoints. We all know what the Nazis were willing to do, and conversely, Microsoft was and is actively trying to create a digital Third World, and literally disenfranchise and exile anyone not ready to first go all-MS in all things, and more disturbingly, to equally punish those not willing or able to spend substantial amounts of money keeping pace with an arbitrarily set technological limit that serves nobody but MS. It's all very well that MS isn't out to kill anybody, but when their whole approach is to punish 'holdouts' and keep things unstable and madly upgrading, we are talking about digitally disenfranchising most of the world, as very very few human beings can afford to drop as much money on technology as MS requires. The ability to run dos or Linux or old Macintoshes means absolutely squat when the entire infrastructure of the Net is continually changed to lock these aging tools out, and as Net access becomes ever more important, we are very much talking about the establishment of a technological ruling class with the only access to information, influence, possibly the only class allowed to participate in newly invented online politics, possibly the only class allowed to use certain types of electronic banking (already a problem for non Windows consumers) or travel booking or any of a number of other resources. If a country decided to invade the US and forbid the poor from using banks, voting, travelling, and set up a class of Americans which were allowed full privileges, while everyone else was denied those privileges, it would be considered an act of war. Why is it so different when Bill Gates consistently moves in the direction of this exact state of affairs? In what way is Gates' obsession with control and establishing a privileged class of Windows users, with holdouts punished and ideally locked off the Net entirely in the long run, so different from the motivations of a politician acting in the interests of their own privileged class and trying to punish and suppress all other classes of people? You can't say it comes down to killing people: even before the Nazis were killing people, they were out to restrict rights and punish those not of the privileged class. How is this different from what Gates does in the technological sphere? In the modern, Internet age, how can anyone claim that the technological sphere has no civic relevance, or significance to a citizen? I guess I am saying this: you're wrong, because Hitler and Gates are far more similar in motivation than you're ready to admit. Hitler was not simply a frothing psychopath, he was a particular _kind_ of frothing psychopath, one with a lust for vengeance and the ability to inspire the tyranny of a privileged class. Gates doesn't lack the lust for vengeance, or the ability to foster a privileged class, and he is every bit as hungry for control, plus he arguably has more money than the Third Reich had. Downplaying this is stupid, as Hitler's dead but we're still stuck with Gates.:P
I know that I would personally be willing to put a great deal of effort into such 'simple, low-end' solutions in such a situation, and I would do it even if doing such work was against the law. The question is not whether such an overpowering monopoly can literally crush out any opposition at all costs- that's not likely. Instead you should be asking this question: where would I draw the line? Do you want your mom or grandmother or non-geek friends to be stuck with the monopolistic, low quality and extortionate products, or do you want to give them a better shot at being able to choose something that suits their needs? I think it is quite reasonable to want the monopoly reined in: not for the sake of the hardcore 'freedom fighters' who'll fight for their ability to make choices and take some damage willingly to do so, but for the sake of the uneducated and the lazy, who are more easily exploited. You may disagree and feel that people _should_ be exploited if they won't take responsibility for themselves, in which case we'll have to disagree. I'm not saying every AOLer needs to be handheld and taught what the web is: I'm just saying that it behooves proper geeks to make some kind of effort to protect the people who are the most easily exploited by monopolies. They need to have choices even if they are not seeking them out- if they don't have choices or freedom, most of them will not realize they _could_ have choices.
Objection to the 1$ of 16$ figure:
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 2
Sorry, you're _way_ out of the ballpark with that one, not that this conflicts with your opinions or anything;) Virtually no artists get even that $1. You're totally overlooking the costs of recording, pay to play, and getting to the point of having the 16$ CD on sale. Being signed may well mean being given money by the record company to do these things- all that comes out of the royalty. The artist has to come up with their own money to promote, and is contractually bound to the record company. On top of this, that 1$ is reduced to *estimate* I'd guess about 50 or 60 cents due to extensive commissions and cuts and charges every step of the way: exemplified by the 'shellac breakage' charge that artists are _still_ paying. It's a racket: this _is_ the industry busted for payola, after all. In the modern day, if there is payola, the artist has to come up with _that_ out of his remaining 50-60 cents, which also goes to paying off recording costs. I would say if you want to average it out, and calculating only for the major labels, out of a $16 CD sale, your average artist also pays another 30 cents or so to the record company for the _privilege_ of being a rock and roll star. That's average: some will be further in debt, and some will manage to earn between ten to thirty cents on each $16 CD the record company sells. You might have the occasional superstar making $1 or more, but platinum != superstar, and some of the real chart toppers have ended up in the worst debt- it is the businessmen musicians who manage to actually earn anything, and most of them still do not recoup their recording costs and never see a royalty. Again (with the dreaded boldface!;) ), it's more reasonable to include the actual costs of playing the game and say, "The average artist PAYS ten cents to the record company for each CD sold, due to having to cover promotion and pay their way the whole time, plus having to recoup recording expenses from advance royalties." Read Steve Albini's rants if you want more relentless detail on all this. Yes, it's that bad. Another good resource is a man whom I took a music business course in the 80s, Peter Knickles, who is really gifted at getting this reality through musician's heads and then helping them learn how to turn enough of a profit that they can afford to survive doing music as a job (!), which involves a tremendous amount of work and the total abandonment of silly trust in record companies.
"Supporting the artist" *hehehehe*
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 2
Oh, man, I wish more people realised how wickedly sarcastic you are being with that remark;) Of course, if you add "Except that the royalty they get on the CDs is diluted and taken away by every random charge up to and including charges for broken SHELLAC on CD pressings (I am not making this up), plus it only goes to pay back the advance which is only an advance on royalties but the artist does have to cover all promotion, recording costs etc. out of their own pocket, meaning that for most platinum sellers they are _paying_ a lot of money to be a rock and roll star, not making it, and if they're riding around in Caddys they're all the worse in debt to the record company, which will be expecting to be repaid, either in royalties recouped directly from the artist's cut, or just plain money from getting a day job..." ...well, then you wouldn't be as _subtle_;)
Correction: the artistic equivalent of OSS might well be commission or retainer. I've been commissioned for fiction writing- the story Passages was a commission for money, for which the client was well satisfied. I even got to use my own artistic judgement on how it came out and the points it made- it was a lot of work balancing that, but I did it. However, with regard to music the money is in _merchandising_, not having people commission you to write songs for them. Yes, if you're amazing then maybe you might get commissioned- just as, if you're an amazing instrumentalist, you can be retained as a house musician somewhere. However, in the world of the net, where the art goes out there for free, the winning solution is to then sell posh versions, or shirts, or posters, that sort of thing. Hell, sell figurines;) For example, I don't have stuff up at the moment, but my most recent mix was a long format rock instrumental with a 'live band feel' in which the low-end was absolutely phenomenal- we're talking low end authority to utterly show off any subwoofer no matter how expensive, or on the other hand to make any truck go 'boom';) Bearing that in mind, I have a definite outlet for 'audiophile' CDs (actually, I could omit the quotes- I mix _damn_ well and build my own equipment- but my point is that I'd have a big market in pure bass test stuff, which is not truly audiophile). I have albums of pop/rock songs which I think are good songs. If I can deliver them well enough, really rock 'em and make great albums, then I'd have an extra outlet- besides selling audiophile CDs of the original sources for the mp3s (or custom mixes, for instance for more dynamic range or 'in your face' radio mix CDs), I would definitely be well advised to try and come up with a T-shirt or poster. How many techno bands would be well advised to do a _mouse_ pad? I use a fancy 3M mousepad, but even so I could easily see using a 'u4ia' mousepad if he made them (classic Amiga techno MOD artist, now goes by F8 and no he doesn't make mousepads;) ) You've got to think merchandising, not trying to 'milk' the very music that you're trying to have _everybody_ listening to. Having it be free is a very good way to help 'everybody' be listening to it. If you can get that happening, if you're that good an artist, then other avenues begin to open up. And you won't make millions- but seriously, lots of 'industry' artists end up heavily in DEBT for their art. Bands that don't recoup royalties, artists signing away everything, pay-to-play just in order to get booked at gigs: it's an absolute snake pit, evil, if you want to make money you're better off giving away free mp3s and then trying to sell mousepads, CDs and figurines over your little website. Seriously...
Desktop Pictures (jpg) Tiling Background Library (gif/jpg/xpm) Dithered Background Textures (gif/xpm) Oddly enough, just last night I was doing an analysis of airwindows.com traffic, and found that although no specific weblog showed it, a huge amount of activity at my site had to do with people who were searching for art. They found it at airwindows, they downloaded it, they looked around to see what else was there. I went and enhanced what I had. I made web gifs of the XPM tiles I'd originally meant for strictly Linux background purposes. Conversely, I went to the dithered GIFs I'd made, and I made XPM versions of all of them. I made all of it available, updated the links, tidied it up a bit, made sure it worked. All of these are free downloads. I request that nobody try to take credit: that's it, that's the only condition. Anything else is fair game. I can't do this with mp3s on my site- for the very simple reason that I have way too much music to store as mp3s on my site (by several orders of magnitude), some of which is very long format. However, I've been steadily building the needed mastering equipment to go into mp3 in a very big way, and when I do I anticipate loading really huge amounts of original music onto mp3.com or somewhere like that, somewhere that just yells, 'Bring it on! more megabytes please!' knowing that they get ad revenues for hosting good content. At that point, my making money from that content is _my_ problem. If my engineering isn't good enough to be worth spending money on an uncompressed CD version, that's my problem- if my music isn't so cool that everybody buys T-Shirts and posters from me, that's my problem. MP3 will be my radio- it's the loss leader, it's what I give out like I give out the silly little webgifs:) it's the sort of thing where I can vow to never restrict or limit it, because I'm not greedy- I can give some things and sell others, I don't need 'protection' in the form of mp3 encryption, I don't need to harass music listeners like a repo man- that sucks, it's stupid, it's bad business, and it's certainly not entertainment. Entertainment is optional. It seems the big entertainment industries are forgetting that....
This is a fair criticism
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 2
It's easy to be upset at copyright because the big corps are using it as a weapon, and overlook the consequences of getting rid of it. Basically, the last thing you want to do is obliterate the few protections artists and authors _do_ have: get rid of copyright and what happens? Your buddy records a great song, and in two weeks the Spice Girls are flooding the market with it, followed by Hanson, Ricky Martin and Etc., and there's no recourse and nothing to be done about it. Weakening copyright itself will _not_ help the already very weak position of the modernday artist. Varese said "The present day composer refuses to die!" but he can sure be forced to starve, with a bit of work. The problem here is not copyright: it is abuses by large corporations, in particular it is attempts by these industries to _establish_ a monopolistic 'trust' situation. They feel very strongly that no art, music, whatever _can_ occur outside of their control, so they see nothing wrong with cracking down on all the TECHNOLOGIES that could proliferate alternative distribution channels that would compete with them. This is worsened by the fact that they are already exploiting their artists so badly (taking a cut away from the artist for typical rates of broken SHELLAC on CDs? It was already absurd to do this to artists when records had become vinyl and not so subject to cracking, but with CDs it's beyond ludicrous, it's insulting, a slap in the face), that the artists do NOT have a financial incentive to stick with the industry. It is genuinely a better risk to try being a cottage indie CD producer and distribute your own stuff with _no_ industry support or music store presence or radio play- that's not a claim of how great indie-land is, it's a withering indictment of just how bad the industry has become. And yet that's the reality- so the problem is this: rather than attack copyright, you have to defend the ability of artists to get their works to their customers. I don't care how many people rip songs to mp3 (I don't), I want the ability to put MY music on it and distribute it. I want mp3 walkmen, a whole proliferation of technology that I as an independent can tap into. I don't even care if only one in a thousand of my listeners buys a CD from me- that's still better than I'd be doing with the mainstream industry, at least I'd have half a chance to _get_ that thousand listeners and sell a CD. As an artist I would _cheerfully_ put up with my stuff being widely copied. Hell, I wouldn't expect to be able to charge for mp3s in the first place. The money is just where it is in the mainstream industry- gigging, merchandising, merchandising and merchandising;) I do studio projects and won't gig, so for me it'd be a question of making CDs to sell, maybe posters or shirts (I have a friend who runs a T-Shirt print shop), and of course if I got known enough I'd be able to sell recording time at my studio, and that would be a kick, helping other people do what I did and getting paid for it. I'm still doing the legwork on all this. It's slow when you don't have a budget or a team of people. However, it's still a worthy dream- and it _requires_ that people have access to the media I'd have to use. If the industries kill mp3s they kill me as an artist, because I could use that media, given the chance, and get a fair hearing with things produced the way I wanted them. On the other hand, if the world killed copyright- I'd be hosed. I have a _book_ online, I have songs that are to be online when I have the tech to master them really _well_, and if you take copyright it's an open invitation for the wealthy industry to go cherry-picking, take anything they like, and build synthetic artists with lots of distribution and promotion on the back of MY creative work, if it's good enough to steal. That's not acceptable- I can't afford to fight that, and it'd be horribly destructive. See the issue as access to tools! And fight to make sure the technologies remain available! It's OK if they want to make stupidly encrypted DVDs as long as we have the capacity to make NON encrypted DVDs that will play on consumer players. It's okay for the idiots to invent a new encrypted CD format as long as the consumer players still play the extant CD audio format that we have access to writing. It's okay if digital walkmen play some twisted encrypted MS format as long as they still play the mp3 format that indies can afford to use! This is the key point: access to tools. Don't even try to hit the industries directly, defend! Defend against the determined attempts to remove choice for the consumer, to make the consumer incapable of consuming the 'outlaw' media. That outlaw media is the last great hope of independent artists in a corporate-controlled world. There's not much money in it- this differs from record company exploitation how? It's access to tools, access to media- it must not be lost. Already there are blank tape taxes (as ktakki mentions), basically the music industry TAXING indies as if they were a government, on the grounds that no artists other than record company clients exist. How much more is in store if we don't defend against this? What would it have been like if blank tapes were simply outlawed? Throw the internet into the equation, and they might do the equivalent of outlawing blank tapes just because 'it's Internet', it's different. These crackdowns: imagine if the record industry insisted on doing spot checks, breaking into people's rooms and confiscating all their cassettes to see if any were taped off LPs. (That'd be real popular at the Berklee College of Music!;P ) Why is this suddenly okay when it's being done in cyberspace? Is data not property?
*ahem* but I _do_ want the government stepping in when Linux makes its way to the top: defined as 90 percent of the desktops, no room for anything else in the stores, venture capitalists have to go talk to Linus or maybe Tux to find out what air supply they are planning to cut off today, and everything that isn't Linux begins to dry up and starve. You see, you are apparently a young kid who's never seen a non-MS-controlled computer industry, and you don't understand that it's not normal, healthy, or right for a single player to get that powerful. Most of all, it's not _normal_. Linux world domination would be about 60% maybe: that's enough! It's enough to always be taken seriously and be widely supported in hardware and software. There is NO REASON to believe that a normal competitor would even get to the 90% and up point: in order to do that you have to basically wage total war on letting your customers have a choice. If Linux started getting that arrogant, I would certainly want the DoJ to do something about it. If Apple (I run MacOS a lot) got 70% I would _expect_ them to run amok and go for the 90% and up, and I would want _them_ acted against by the government. If I, a mac user, can say that I would want Apple stopped if they started approaching 90% lockout of all other computer platforms, and you, obviously the loser in that situation, would agree with this protection of your choices, why in God's name do you expect me to consider supporting you in your shortsighted and uneducated defense of monopolies just because at the moment _you_ supposedly benefit from the current one? Note the supposedly: you don't actually benefit, because you yourself are starved of choices without being willing to admit it.
Is this why he insisted on publicness- because he had to choose between a thousand Microsofties with a billion dollars, or a million consumers with a million VOTES? It certainly looked in the Post story as if he was not playing to the Microsofties- his remarks were straight from the judge, in a way, especially given the context, where he could have just _hedged_ a lot and got away with it. It's interesting that he chose to get some jibes in that _had_ to alienate the Microsofties. So is this the meeting that he insisted on being public- and was it an artful pitch to consumers everywhere to side with Gore, 'the guy ready to call Microsoft on their abuses'? If so, does this have to equate to actually being ready to _do_ it, or is Gore capable of doing this and then turning around, taking a lot of money from MS and letting them go? Is he that treacherous, or is he not?
Slashdot Mirror
If I'd said, "Hey, man, get me a _knife_ okay? 'Cause I want to STAB somebody, okay? Get me a knife 'cause there's this guy I don't like and if you give me a knife I'll stab him and remove his entrails and loop them decoratively around his neck, okay?" then yeah, sure :) :)
If I wanted it for chopping vegetables for Thanksgiving stuffing and that was my story, then unless I was acting really unstable I doubt you'd be blamed, but if I was totally set on stabbing somebody and knowing this you gave me the knife anyway, you're an idiot, you had the option and cause to refuse (hey, you're the one with the knife) and so (unless you had me at gunpoint or something) you certainly should be blamed.
You'll find that disclaiming all responsibility for your actions has only limited usefulness in the real world
What does it say about Slashdot that people are willing to take this as insight and inspiration? It's rather disturbing. One would like to believe that slashdot geeks have minds analytical enough to make reasonable value judgements, yet it seems that many are willing to draw inspiration from extremely nebulous and woolly talk, even willing to suggest that the person responsible for this vague talk is observant or wise. It's rather like deriving insight from emacs' Doctor mode: Jon is not having any ideas, and his ability to summarize and explain the old ideas he's using is weakening. The sheer wandering, centerless quality of his output raises questions of whether he is well: most people's thought processes are not so disconnected.
Now that I've said that, anyone is welcome to mark it flamebait 20,000 times until your mouse drops off. I don't mind being 'censored', I just wished to say my piece, particularly since people were citing this article as something _better_ than most Katz articles, when in fact it is simply _vaguer_... shockingly vaguer, in fact. How much farther can this go before Slashdot notices- or before Jon Katz needs help? There comes a point where the writing tells a pathological story as well as a literary story. If Jon posted an essay in which every other sentence left out a key word, would people consider that grounds for his needing a medical checkup? I do agree that writing an essay to be read publically by large numbers of people and leaving out a key word in _one_ sentence is merely evidence of sloppiness, though it does raise the issue of where that word went: what happened between the brain and the hands and the eyes that he didn't spot that? It helps nobody if Jon Katz has some sort of breakdown and begins posting greatly deteriorated essays to slashdot- even if the subjects he picks are those that slashdotters can talk interestingly about.
"We're geeks, and you'll pay us to talk over your head!"
*g*
Inspired by being paid $75 an hour to grovel through a guy's web pages explaining, experimenting and going "Well. That's interesting. The reason that didn't work is because..." (though actually we spent 3 hours at it and I only billed for the one we originally planned on)
- Selecting menu entries, popup or root or Start
- Entering text in text entry areas
- Clicking a small button with an icon on it
- Clicking a larger button with text on it
- Radio buttons, checkboxes, listboxes
- Keyboard shortcuts (combinations like meta-*)
- Editing a dotfile
Which of these control types need to be made the sole control for a type of functionality? (i.e. you tend not to have text input that can also be done by 27 radio buttons for each letter, but often icon buttons _are_ doubled by menu items, sometimes with a keyboard shortcut also available.) Which if any do you feel represents the preferred KDE method of doing things, and which if any are discouraged?I don't _use_ Windows: I'm typing this from a Mac- and MS still found ways to harm me. They systematically exterminated all the software companies they could and did everything they could to ensure that nobody would write software for anything but _their_ operating system. This _is_ covered in the findings of fact as one of the types of damage they inflicted. They did this so well that _your_ instinctive reaction is to behave like there is no software for anything else. That's how close they came to scorching the earth for the entire computer industry, and I can name off a long list of products which didn't really have to be Windows-only.
I can quite legitimately blame Bill Gates for screwing up the market for Mac software, or indeed for Linux software or Be software: it's all the same argument, by abusing their monopoly they screwed up the normal operation of the free market. The FoF covers this, and the drying up of alternatives is considered one of the most subtly harmful results of the abuse of monopoly.
...reading geeky humor :)
My personal favorite is the obscure MPW compiler messages: note the secret The WHO reference! http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/PR- MPW.html
"a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program"
"This array has no size, and that's bad"
"Call me paranoid but finding `/*' inside this comment makes me suspicious"
"Huh ?"
(and many more)
Like we'd say when I worked shipping and receiving...
;) )
"...ooops!"
(disclaimer: here in Brattleboro, Vermont, FedEx sucks worse and UPS has been pretty good. Not that I've tried to insure anything, mind you
The deal is this: if MS are sane, then they will settle. However, it's not a foregone conclusion that MS _are_ sane: some of their behavior in the case seemed delusional, and apparently the company is now fighting desperately to keep its own employees from 'losing faith' and believing in things like the findings of fact. I'd say there was a very good chance that the Microsoft side will go down fighting, simply because they are quite seriously insane when compared to the standard of sanity set by judges and juries and normal people. In this sense they don't know what's good for them because they will not entertain the idea that they might have done anything wrong: when the leadership of a company is that strong and that determined to stick with a course of action, they may decide that no judge is qualified to pass judgement on them. They're being asked to accept as fact that they've done many harmful things, and it may be a lot to ask to expect these people to admit they've done wrong. Don't always assume the MS leadership are perfectly sane rationalists. They are considerably more passionate and fanatical than that.
Even if nobody gets access to source code, and there's no serious damages, this is the structure we need, based on the following facts:
- Windows 9* is junky, but insanely prevalent
- Windows 9* runs on older computers and runs more games and software than NT/W2K
- NT/W2K is not as junky as 9*, but is a lot more expensive and is geared (supposedly) for big iron, or at least as near big iron as PCs ever get
- NT/W2K is much less cooperative about running on junky hardware, and won't run anywhere near as much software, particularly games, particularly legacy games that make assumptions about having direct access to hardware
See the pattern here? It may or may not be difficult to compete with W2K in the server market, what with PHBs getting sold on creative benchmarking- but it would not be hard for a 'W95 forever!' sort of product to do great against it in the consumer market, merrily thriving in a chaos of confusion and muddled old junky hardware. At the same time, W95 is junky enough that it's reasonable for other consumer OSes to arise as alternatives (Macintosh is definitely best positioned, but why shouldn't there be others, ones that run on PC hardware?). On the flip side, W95 couldn't possibly compete with W2K on the server side- but without the money from a locked-in _consumer_ monopoly to prop it up, the Windows Server company would have to really work hard to avoid being overcome by Solaris on the high end, Linux on the low end, BSD all over, etc etc. And the best part is: by being redefined as specifically a server OS, NT would suddenly not have to incorporate all sorts of gamer junk and bloat itself with consumer crud in efforts to eventually take over from 95/98: it'd be able to start competing more _effectively_, albeit at a higher price than its already high price- but it might actually become fairly _good_ and worthy of respect if it's not being molded into the next consumer OS.Seriously: the _most_ important split anyone could structurally make would be consumer/professional, on the OS itself. Yes, the Windows 95 legacy is garbage: but THAT is what the monopoly is mostly built of, and a company made to do specifically maintenance of the Windows 95/98/Millenium legacy would be a heck of a profitable operation. Lots of old and current PCs would remain in service running it for years- it'd never get stable or reliable, but so what? Gradually alternatives would arise without obliterating 9* as a nice standardised consumer platform. Hell, Microsoft's _current_ plans, to eventually transition all Windows users to W2K someday, would cause more damage to the industry than this.
I'm not sure whether to be pleased or insulted that my arguments are so memorable to top KDE people without having them actually convice said top KDE people ;) ("insulted!" ;) )
It _is_ a matter of thinking. And yes, I _have_ tried both KDE and Gnome. KDE let me log onto the net using kppp before I'd even sorted out pppd. I owe KDE lasting thanks for being an important part of my Linux adoption process.
That said, you're completely, stubbornly wrong about your assumption that it's all just a matter of habits. That's a crock: it's also both uneducated and insulting that you're claiming I hated KDE simply because it was unfamiliar- if that is the case, why did I enjoy bash? My objections to _BOTH_ KDE and Gnome are simply that they attempt to do desktop interface _badly_. They bring nothing new and make little or no effort to actually present a consistent, predictable visual 'picture' of the computer.
In fairness, I will point out one of the major points that always leads me to this conclusion- I have never seen _any_ file manager, other than the MacOS Finder, that behaves as though the user's placement of an icon or object is in any way significant or worthy of notice. It's always 'and now we sort everything and line it up in neat rows, because we can'. I _realise_ that's what everybody but MacOS does, but can't you see that it screws up people's orientation? That's not how a desk behaves. On a desk, you put stuff down and it stays where you put it- witness the cluttered workbenches of a thousand techies all over the world. If someone came in and organised everything alphabetically, they would be _lost_. Why do you and just about every other GUI maker insist on taking control of the graphical objects and reshuffling them?
To add to this, you may well do better than most X developers (particularly singling out the GNU developers, who should know better!) at providing keyboard shortcuts to operations. However, you seem to not have a clue as to how prevalent and consistent this is in the environment I'm talking about- it really loses you credibility to claim that my switching to KDE and doing everything that way is merely a matter of habit. You don't seem to know what you're talking about... so you insist, repeatedly, that it's just a matter of my being personally prejudiced against your way of doing things, which you maintain is not merely comparable but equal. Do you have _any_ _idea_ of how many millions of dollars a company like Apple spent on human interface design? On how many hundreds of hours designers like Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini spent designing and testing and working to make these things sensible and usable? Have you actually read the work of others in this area? Hell, you could read _Microsoft_ Human Interface Guidelines- they don't obey their own rules, but they too have put the effort into this area, and that's for just one reason: it's not just a matter of what people are used to, there are actual rights and wrongs involved.
I don't care if you say 'I personally believe your mac is probably better in usability'. I am saying this: as somebody who is concerned with human interface design, I would like to see you making less assumptions. Yes, the world is heavily biased (polluted?) due to the vast numbers of people who have been extensively taught Windows HI rules. Yes, I personally am out in left field using a Mac but espousing purely CLI human interface guidelines, something I haven't even really begun to properly develop on a large scale. Still, every time (and it's been several times, hasn't it?) I see you come back at a critisism with 'That's just your habits speaking, there's no difference so just try it and lose your other habits', I cringe. You CAN'T learn anything if you deny there's anything to learn. KDE is ill served by those assumptions. Keep them if you must- I choose to challenge them.
That capacity to reduce diversity to a single monoculture is the _main_ reason Windows viruses are so nasty. It's the reason most Windows people are using one particular interface that is jack of all trades, master of none. It is not a good thing at all.
The only reason people think it's a good thing is because until recently there has been no evidence to suggest you could survive doing anything else. Hence, the emotional reaction is 'we must all do this or die!'. First of all, Linux is still around without doing that (and indeed growing, and indeed there are still other options neither Windows nor Linux), and secondly, this assumption was formed from observing a monopoly at the top of its form and making every effort to kill off everything resembling 'diversity'.
If even this has not made the 'monoculture', everybody-runs-Windows approach safe and beneficial to all, what good would it be to try and make Linux a monoculture, with all the disadvantages it brings, but with none of the ability to exert corporate power and influence and throw around huge sums of money?
Seriously. That'd be a _phenomenally_ bad tactical move.
A lot of Apple _users_ have been Anti-Microsoft. Apple itself is not antimicrosoft- however, Apple has been an ALTERNATIVE to Microsoft for a very long time. And, indeed, that's something to appreciate. Alternatives are good...
I boot _MacOS_ for that sort of thing.
...er, things didn't exactly work out that way...
Linux offers me things that I CANNOT get from MacOS or Windows, in a million years, not in Jobs and Gates' wildest dreams. At this time, mostly what it offers me is an escape hatch. I am typing this in MacOS, from which I've been reading interesting news such as the fact that newer MacOSes are bringing in auto-update behaviors that are the antithesis of what I can tolerate on my computer.
I don't think either KDE or Gnome are remotely comparable to MacOS for usability. I don't _ask_ Linux to be as usable as what I pay for with MacOS. Instead I ask different things of Linux: first, I ask that it be there if I need it, and second, I ask it to be something I can completely control and audit, the power to reconfigure the system being in _my_ hands- lastly, I ask it to not forget this, but I am thankful that the nature of Linux is to preserve areas of difference and iconoclasm where I'd be able to settle.
I dispute that a desktop environment adds functionality. I _totally_ dispute that. I use one every day in MacOS and I still dispute that claim... what's happening is that the desktop environment is _attempting_ to provide _other_ _interfaces_ to data and ideas that might otherwise have to be jotted down as notes or interacted with by words and sentences.
This is a far cry from providing _added_ functionality. Particularly with the Windows paradigm, it's actually a loss of functionality in many ways- the attempts at other interfaces end up so strange and convoluted that the 'visual' environment has more unwritten rules than the old CLI environments had. This all must be memorized, just as CLI rules were: another nasty gotcha is the tendency to assume that the GUI approach is inherently so 'intuitive' that controls and objects can be strewn around and reshuffled arbitrarily.
These new desktop environments are not remotely new- they are simply implementations of 'the other paradigm' in computer interaction. First there was language-based interaction, and 'talking' to the computer with words, commands, and remembering what it said in reply. Then there was the graphic-based interaction, which was originally intended to convey the sense of a logical, consistent environment like a physical object such as a desk, 'mapping' to direct physical manipulation of realworld objects, and operating on specific rules worked out in advance.
I dualboot LinuxPPC (not terribly often, but I insist on being able to do it). This means that there are some Linux software packages that I can't, actually run, because anything that's binary-only or depends on PC hardware is something I can't run. For instance, anything that expects a parallel port is likewise something I can't use.
Contrariwise, if someone makes a Linux binary that is a x86 virus, I can't run it either (nor would I want to). There's a level of inconvenience that is also protection. Add to this the fact that I like to not run a desktop such as KDE or Gnome, and mostly hack around with console apps and play with Window Maker when I _do_ boot into Linux, and it becomes extremely awkward for someone to make a generic Linux virus that can function under those conditions. I end up making a relentlessly nonstandard environment for myself, simply because Linux does _not_ deliver a very well realised and completed user environment, and because it encourages my active involvement in the building of this user environment.
This diversity is a strength, not a weakness: it makes it appallingly difficult for a commercial vendor to target the average Linux system (they will have to pick RH or something and support only that), but it also makes it appallingly difficult for a virus writer to target the average Linux system (again, they will have to pick the RH or something and 'support' only that...)
The most significant effects of this are as follows:
- Commercial 'Winux' offerings will overwhelmingly focus their efforts into a single dist, probably Red Hat, possibly Caldera or Corel or something. Divergent dists and installations will not be supported- with varying degrees of haughtiness.
- Because Linux is in fact poorly suited to being turned into a Windows clone (much of the advantages are wasted), a very _large_ percentage of the userbase will refuse to be homogenized, _much_ larger than the comparable percentage of Windows or Mac users running substantially unusual configurations. This will continue, emphasised by the ability to distribute and publicise novel experiments in interface and user environment.
- Because of this, Linux will continue to seemingly be penalized in comparison with, for instance, Windows, as a developer's platform and commercial target platform- the commercial Linux distributions will infight and intentionally foster conflicts with each other, and too many users will drastically alter their user environments to make distribution of generic Linux software easy. Some vendors will define really limited targets, others will attempt to issue zillions of patches and diffs to cover the widest area possible. These approaches will coexist.
- At this time, at least _some_ people will have the presence of mind to suggest the obvious: there is choice, change to a different sort of Linux that is not vulnerable. No single Linux distributor will have the leverage to be able to significantly eliminate other dists (though certain ones may be able to get very large percentages of marketshare simply through commercial distribution networks and the ability to make the Linux versions of 'AOL disks' and proliferate them)
So, the 'Linux virus' _will_ exist, but it's important to understand the context they will exist in. They will be targeting the passive consumers and the largest commercial vendors- anytime you have a single voice outshouting the chorus, you'll have the Linux virus targetted to that particular distribution, perhaps motivated by anger at some business decisions the company makes that violate unwritten or written rules, perhaps simply taking advantage of sloppiness.When Linux virii _do_ become a significant force, the commercial Linux distributions will be the ones taking the hit, and such attacks will be specific to individual releases of commercial distributions.
Tony Hancock, Max Linder, Mark Sheridan, T. E. Dunville, the French clown Marceline, Freddie Prinze... that's not counting attempted suicides and drug and alcohol abuse (many others). It's like black-lung for coal miners: black-spirit for comedians. It's daunting. One cannot protect some types of artists- they remain vulnerable and you can only wish them well and do what you can to not overload them, knowing that much of the world will not be so forgiving, and even if it was, it still might not help... ;P *heh*
In conclusion, I'd just like to say, "Suicide is baaaad, mmkay?"
Not mine: I run system 8.1. However, the new version of Sherlock (impressive search tool) does network activity without asking and tries to update its plugins, MS apps try to autoupdate and there are other system software components that try to autoupdate.
That's where I get off, frankly: I _will_ _not_ go along with that. If that means I run system 8 until it can't be usefully used and then go with Linux, so be it: it's absolutely true that it's an exploitable feature, but what you are not acknowledging is how unhealthy it can be even WITHOUT virii being installed. Supposing all the Lotus Notes users had NT autoupdate the NT fixpack that 'happened to' kill Lotus Notes? This whole scenario _might_ be permissible if all commercial developers were responsible and did extensive compatibility testing (HA!), but as things are, it's a recipe for rapidly losing control of your machine, not knowing why it's increasingly broken, and not having the power to even fix it, even if you know all kinds of things about the machine and can debug the installation and troubleshoot it infallibly. We're talking sort of plug and play hassle at the software level- instead of cards fighting you every step of the way, it's the potential for software itself to get into fights with other software, and every time you turn around something downloaded an update which turns out to break something else.
That's an absolute nightmare waiting to happen, and as I said, I could easily see it driving me to Linux fulltime in the long run if people don't STOP trying to do this insane behavior. Auto update assumes that the newer a version or update is, the better. Almost any computer user can identify cases where the opposite is true. I was forced to stop using iCab and return to Netscape _because_ newer versions became hopeless crashfests- and I'm not using a newer version of Netscape, either, I'm using a particular version that seemed to like my machine more than usual. And it only takes _one_ autoupdate to a broken or conflicting application to hose you- in the case of system software or always-resident software, it can cripple you entirely.
The two have some very strong similarities. Primarily, they both thirsted for power on a very large scale. Hitler wanted to rule for 'a thousand years', where Gates wanted to run MS software on 'every computer'. In both cases, they accumulated people around them which magnified their arrogance and destructiveness. :P
Hitler was filled with vengefulness towards the world due to the Versailles Treaty, and his main thesis was getting revenge for that 'insult' to the German people, and indeed the treaty was a great blow to German pride and helped create conditions for the Third Reich.
Gates was filled with vengefulness towards the world due to his Altair Basic tapes being wildly pirated, and his main theme was getting revenge for that 'insult' by never letting anyone 'steal' from him again, by making his software so necessary that he could never again be treated as just another hacker to take ideas from. Gates wanted control, and to punish the 'hacker', and indeed nobody'd asked his permission or opinion on the copying of his port of Basic: the hackers 'liberated' it instead, enraging Gates and setting the tone for his style of technology, always centralising control of the software somewhere other than the computer user, a path of vengeance that continues to this day, and colors all of Microsoft's technological developments right down to the ideas for 'Office on the Web'.
Honestly, when you look at the two men in terms of being driven by vengeance and hunger for power and control, they are very similar indeed. They even generate comparable 'reality distortion fields', in that their vengeances are so fierce that neither was an uncomplicatedly charismatic leader: in both cases the man was compelling but alarming at the same time, causing a polarisation between the hardcore devotees ('brownshirts' and 'microsofties') and others who would be disconcerted by the ferocity of the movement and try, fatally, to be quiet and hope things would settle down.
There are profound and fascinating parallels between the men and their movements, and to deny this is foolish and shortsighted. Microsoft is far too recent to expect these things can be discussed sensibly- they will never be discussed dispassionately, because on the one hand mass murder and Master Race theorising, and on the other hand crushing of all choice and Industry Standard theorising, are ugly things, and it's shocking to consider what each concept means and how far the respective movements were willing to take their viewpoints. We all know what the Nazis were willing to do, and conversely, Microsoft was and is actively trying to create a digital Third World, and literally disenfranchise and exile anyone not ready to first go all-MS in all things, and more disturbingly, to equally punish those not willing or able to spend substantial amounts of money keeping pace with an arbitrarily set technological limit that serves nobody but MS.
It's all very well that MS isn't out to kill anybody, but when their whole approach is to punish 'holdouts' and keep things unstable and madly upgrading, we are talking about digitally disenfranchising most of the world, as very very few human beings can afford to drop as much money on technology as MS requires. The ability to run dos or Linux or old Macintoshes means absolutely squat when the entire infrastructure of the Net is continually changed to lock these aging tools out, and as Net access becomes ever more important, we are very much talking about the establishment of a technological ruling class with the only access to information, influence, possibly the only class allowed to participate in newly invented online politics, possibly the only class allowed to use certain types of electronic banking (already a problem for non Windows consumers) or travel booking or any of a number of other resources.
If a country decided to invade the US and forbid the poor from using banks, voting, travelling, and set up a class of Americans which were allowed full privileges, while everyone else was denied those privileges, it would be considered an act of war.
Why is it so different when Bill Gates consistently moves in the direction of this exact state of affairs? In what way is Gates' obsession with control and establishing a privileged class of Windows users, with holdouts punished and ideally locked off the Net entirely in the long run, so different from the motivations of a politician acting in the interests of their own privileged class and trying to punish and suppress all other classes of people? You can't say it comes down to killing people: even before the Nazis were killing people, they were out to restrict rights and punish those not of the privileged class. How is this different from what Gates does in the technological sphere? In the modern, Internet age, how can anyone claim that the technological sphere has no civic relevance, or significance to a citizen?
I guess I am saying this: you're wrong, because Hitler and Gates are far more similar in motivation than you're ready to admit. Hitler was not simply a frothing psychopath, he was a particular _kind_ of frothing psychopath, one with a lust for vengeance and the ability to inspire the tyranny of a privileged class. Gates doesn't lack the lust for vengeance, or the ability to foster a privileged class, and he is every bit as hungry for control, plus he arguably has more money than the Third Reich had. Downplaying this is stupid, as Hitler's dead but we're still stuck with Gates.
I know that I would personally be willing to put a great deal of effort into such 'simple, low-end' solutions in such a situation, and I would do it even if doing such work was against the law.
The question is not whether such an overpowering monopoly can literally crush out any opposition at all costs- that's not likely. Instead you should be asking this question: where would I draw the line? Do you want your mom or grandmother or non-geek friends to be stuck with the monopolistic, low quality and extortionate products, or do you want to give them a better shot at being able to choose something that suits their needs? I think it is quite reasonable to want the monopoly reined in: not for the sake of the hardcore 'freedom fighters' who'll fight for their ability to make choices and take some damage willingly to do so, but for the sake of the uneducated and the lazy, who are more easily exploited.
You may disagree and feel that people _should_ be exploited if they won't take responsibility for themselves, in which case we'll have to disagree. I'm not saying every AOLer needs to be handheld and taught what the web is: I'm just saying that it behooves proper geeks to make some kind of effort to protect the people who are the most easily exploited by monopolies. They need to have choices even if they are not seeking them out- if they don't have choices or freedom, most of them will not realize they _could_ have choices.
Sorry, you're _way_ out of the ballpark with that one, not that this conflicts with your opinions or anything ;) ;) ), it's more reasonable to include the actual costs of playing the game and say, "The average artist PAYS ten cents to the record company for each CD sold, due to having to cover promotion and pay their way the whole time, plus having to recoup recording expenses from advance royalties."
Virtually no artists get even that $1. You're totally overlooking the costs of recording, pay to play, and getting to the point of having the 16$ CD on sale. Being signed may well mean being given money by the record company to do these things- all that comes out of the royalty. The artist has to come up with their own money to promote, and is contractually bound to the record company.
On top of this, that 1$ is reduced to *estimate* I'd guess about 50 or 60 cents due to extensive commissions and cuts and charges every step of the way: exemplified by the 'shellac breakage' charge that artists are _still_ paying. It's a racket: this _is_ the industry busted for payola, after all. In the modern day, if there is payola, the artist has to come up with _that_ out of his remaining 50-60 cents, which also goes to paying off recording costs.
I would say if you want to average it out, and calculating only for the major labels, out of a $16 CD sale, your average artist also pays another 30 cents or so to the record company for the _privilege_ of being a rock and roll star. That's average: some will be further in debt, and some will manage to earn between ten to thirty cents on each $16 CD the record company sells. You might have the occasional superstar making $1 or more, but platinum != superstar, and some of the real chart toppers have ended up in the worst debt- it is the businessmen musicians who manage to actually earn anything, and most of them still do not recoup their recording costs and never see a royalty.
Again (with the dreaded boldface!
Read Steve Albini's rants if you want more relentless detail on all this. Yes, it's that bad. Another good resource is a man whom I took a music business course in the 80s, Peter Knickles, who is really gifted at getting this reality through musician's heads and then helping them learn how to turn enough of a profit that they can afford to survive doing music as a job (!), which involves a tremendous amount of work and the total abandonment of silly trust in record companies.
Oh, man, I wish more people realised how wickedly sarcastic you are being with that remark ;)
...well, then you wouldn't be as _subtle_ ;)
Of course, if you add "Except that the royalty they get on the CDs is diluted and taken away by every random charge up to and including charges for broken SHELLAC on CD pressings (I am not making this up), plus it only goes to pay back the advance which is only an advance on royalties but the artist does have to cover all promotion, recording costs etc. out of their own pocket, meaning that for most platinum sellers they are _paying_ a lot of money to be a rock and roll star, not making it, and if they're riding around in Caddys they're all the worse in debt to the record company, which will be expecting to be repaid, either in royalties recouped directly from the artist's cut, or just plain money from getting a day job..."
Correction: the artistic equivalent of OSS might well be commission or retainer. I've been commissioned for fiction writing- the story Passages was a commission for money, for which the client was well satisfied. I even got to use my own artistic judgement on how it came out and the points it made- it was a lot of work balancing that, but I did it. ;) ;) ;) )
However, with regard to music the money is in _merchandising_, not having people commission you to write songs for them. Yes, if you're amazing then maybe you might get commissioned- just as, if you're an amazing instrumentalist, you can be retained as a house musician somewhere. However, in the world of the net, where the art goes out there for free, the winning solution is to then sell posh versions, or shirts, or posters, that sort of thing. Hell, sell figurines
For example, I don't have stuff up at the moment, but my most recent mix was a long format rock instrumental with a 'live band feel' in which the low-end was absolutely phenomenal- we're talking low end authority to utterly show off any subwoofer no matter how expensive, or on the other hand to make any truck go 'boom'
Bearing that in mind, I have a definite outlet for 'audiophile' CDs (actually, I could omit the quotes- I mix _damn_ well and build my own equipment- but my point is that I'd have a big market in pure bass test stuff, which is not truly audiophile).
I have albums of pop/rock songs which I think are good songs. If I can deliver them well enough, really rock 'em and make great albums, then I'd have an extra outlet- besides selling audiophile CDs of the original sources for the mp3s (or custom mixes, for instance for more dynamic range or 'in your face' radio mix CDs), I would definitely be well advised to try and come up with a T-shirt or poster. How many techno bands would be well advised to do a _mouse_ pad? I use a fancy 3M mousepad, but even so I could easily see using a 'u4ia' mousepad if he made them (classic Amiga techno MOD artist, now goes by F8 and no he doesn't make mousepads
You've got to think merchandising, not trying to 'milk' the very music that you're trying to have _everybody_ listening to. Having it be free is a very good way to help 'everybody' be listening to it. If you can get that happening, if you're that good an artist, then other avenues begin to open up. And you won't make millions- but seriously, lots of 'industry' artists end up heavily in DEBT for their art. Bands that don't recoup royalties, artists signing away everything, pay-to-play just in order to get booked at gigs: it's an absolute snake pit, evil, if you want to make money you're better off giving away free mp3s and then trying to sell mousepads, CDs and figurines over your little website. Seriously...
Desktop Pictures (jpg) :) it's the sort of thing where I can vow to never restrict or limit it, because I'm not greedy- I can give some things and sell others, I don't need 'protection' in the form of mp3 encryption, I don't need to harass music listeners like a repo man- that sucks, it's stupid, it's bad business, and it's certainly not entertainment.
Tiling Background Library (gif/jpg/xpm)
Dithered Background Textures (gif/xpm)
Oddly enough, just last night I was doing an analysis of airwindows.com traffic, and found that although no specific weblog showed it, a huge amount of activity at my site had to do with people who were searching for art. They found it at airwindows, they downloaded it, they looked around to see what else was there.
I went and enhanced what I had. I made web gifs of the XPM tiles I'd originally meant for strictly Linux background purposes. Conversely, I went to the dithered GIFs I'd made, and I made XPM versions of all of them. I made all of it available, updated the links, tidied it up a bit, made sure it worked.
All of these are free downloads. I request that nobody try to take credit: that's it, that's the only condition. Anything else is fair game.
I can't do this with mp3s on my site- for the very simple reason that I have way too much music to store as mp3s on my site (by several orders of magnitude), some of which is very long format. However, I've been steadily building the needed mastering equipment to go into mp3 in a very big way, and when I do I anticipate loading really huge amounts of original music onto mp3.com or somewhere like that, somewhere that just yells, 'Bring it on! more megabytes please!' knowing that they get ad revenues for hosting good content.
At that point, my making money from that content is _my_ problem. If my engineering isn't good enough to be worth spending money on an uncompressed CD version, that's my problem- if my music isn't so cool that everybody buys T-Shirts and posters from me, that's my problem. MP3 will be my radio- it's the loss leader, it's what I give out like I give out the silly little webgifs
Entertainment is optional. It seems the big entertainment industries are forgetting that....
It's easy to be upset at copyright because the big corps are using it as a weapon, and overlook the consequences of getting rid of it. ;) I do studio projects and won't gig, so for me it'd be a question of making CDs to sell, maybe posters or shirts (I have a friend who runs a T-Shirt print shop), and of course if I got known enough I'd be able to sell recording time at my studio, and that would be a kick, helping other people do what I did and getting paid for it. ;P ) Why is this suddenly okay when it's being done in cyberspace? Is data not property?
Basically, the last thing you want to do is obliterate the few protections artists and authors _do_ have: get rid of copyright and what happens? Your buddy records a great song, and in two weeks the Spice Girls are flooding the market with it, followed by Hanson, Ricky Martin and Etc., and there's no recourse and nothing to be done about it. Weakening copyright itself will _not_ help the already very weak position of the modernday artist. Varese said "The present day composer refuses to die!" but he can sure be forced to starve, with a bit of work.
The problem here is not copyright: it is abuses by large corporations, in particular it is attempts by these industries to _establish_ a monopolistic 'trust' situation. They feel very strongly that no art, music, whatever _can_ occur outside of their control, so they see nothing wrong with cracking down on all the TECHNOLOGIES that could proliferate alternative distribution channels that would compete with them.
This is worsened by the fact that they are already exploiting their artists so badly (taking a cut away from the artist for typical rates of broken SHELLAC on CDs? It was already absurd to do this to artists when records had become vinyl and not so subject to cracking, but with CDs it's beyond ludicrous, it's insulting, a slap in the face), that the artists do NOT have a financial incentive to stick with the industry. It is genuinely a better risk to try being a cottage indie CD producer and distribute your own stuff with _no_ industry support or music store presence or radio play- that's not a claim of how great indie-land is, it's a withering indictment of just how bad the industry has become.
And yet that's the reality- so the problem is this: rather than attack copyright, you have to defend the ability of artists to get their works to their customers. I don't care how many people rip songs to mp3 (I don't), I want the ability to put MY music on it and distribute it. I want mp3 walkmen, a whole proliferation of technology that I as an independent can tap into. I don't even care if only one in a thousand of my listeners buys a CD from me- that's still better than I'd be doing with the mainstream industry, at least I'd have half a chance to _get_ that thousand listeners and sell a CD.
As an artist I would _cheerfully_ put up with my stuff being widely copied. Hell, I wouldn't expect to be able to charge for mp3s in the first place. The money is just where it is in the mainstream industry- gigging, merchandising, merchandising and merchandising
I'm still doing the legwork on all this. It's slow when you don't have a budget or a team of people. However, it's still a worthy dream- and it _requires_ that people have access to the media I'd have to use. If the industries kill mp3s they kill me as an artist, because I could use that media, given the chance, and get a fair hearing with things produced the way I wanted them. On the other hand, if the world killed copyright- I'd be hosed. I have a _book_ online, I have songs that are to be online when I have the tech to master them really _well_, and if you take copyright it's an open invitation for the wealthy industry to go cherry-picking, take anything they like, and build synthetic artists with lots of distribution and promotion on the back of MY creative work, if it's good enough to steal. That's not acceptable- I can't afford to fight that, and it'd be horribly destructive.
See the issue as access to tools! And fight to make sure the technologies remain available! It's OK if they want to make stupidly encrypted DVDs as long as we have the capacity to make NON encrypted DVDs that will play on consumer players. It's okay for the idiots to invent a new encrypted CD format as long as the consumer players still play the extant CD audio format that we have access to writing. It's okay if digital walkmen play some twisted encrypted MS format as long as they still play the mp3 format that indies can afford to use! This is the key point: access to tools. Don't even try to hit the industries directly, defend! Defend against the determined attempts to remove choice for the consumer, to make the consumer incapable of consuming the 'outlaw' media. That outlaw media is the last great hope of independent artists in a corporate-controlled world. There's not much money in it- this differs from record company exploitation how? It's access to tools, access to media- it must not be lost. Already there are blank tape taxes (as ktakki mentions), basically the music industry TAXING indies as if they were a government, on the grounds that no artists other than record company clients exist. How much more is in store if we don't defend against this? What would it have been like if blank tapes were simply outlawed? Throw the internet into the equation, and they might do the equivalent of outlawing blank tapes just because 'it's Internet', it's different. These crackdowns: imagine if the record industry insisted on doing spot checks, breaking into people's rooms and confiscating all their cassettes to see if any were taped off LPs. (That'd be real popular at the Berklee College of Music!
*ahem* but I _do_ want the government stepping in when Linux makes its way to the top: defined as 90 percent of the desktops, no room for anything else in the stores, venture capitalists have to go talk to Linus or maybe Tux to find out what air supply they are planning to cut off today, and everything that isn't Linux begins to dry up and starve.
You see, you are apparently a young kid who's never seen a non-MS-controlled computer industry, and you don't understand that it's not normal, healthy, or right for a single player to get that powerful. Most of all, it's not _normal_. Linux world domination would be about 60% maybe: that's enough! It's enough to always be taken seriously and be widely supported in hardware and software. There is NO REASON to believe that a normal competitor would even get to the 90% and up point: in order to do that you have to basically wage total war on letting your customers have a choice. If Linux started getting that arrogant, I would certainly want the DoJ to do something about it. If Apple (I run MacOS a lot) got 70% I would _expect_ them to run amok and go for the 90% and up, and I would want _them_ acted against by the government.
If I, a mac user, can say that I would want Apple stopped if they started approaching 90% lockout of all other computer platforms, and you, obviously the loser in that situation, would agree with this protection of your choices, why in God's name do you expect me to consider supporting you in your shortsighted and uneducated defense of monopolies just because at the moment _you_ supposedly benefit from the current one? Note the supposedly: you don't actually benefit, because you yourself are starved of choices without being willing to admit it.
Is this why he insisted on publicness- because he had to choose between a thousand Microsofties with a billion dollars, or a million consumers with a million VOTES? It certainly looked in the Post story as if he was not playing to the Microsofties- his remarks were straight from the judge, in a way, especially given the context, where he could have just _hedged_ a lot and got away with it. It's interesting that he chose to get some jibes in that _had_ to alienate the Microsofties. So is this the meeting that he insisted on being public- and was it an artful pitch to consumers everywhere to side with Gore, 'the guy ready to call Microsoft on their abuses'? If so, does this have to equate to actually being ready to _do_ it, or is Gore capable of doing this and then turning around, taking a lot of money from MS and letting them go? Is he that treacherous, or is he not?