My understanding was: libraries are a public resource, and they BUY BOOKS. When the book wears out completely, maybe they'll buy another book. You're making it sound like they pay a royalty- actually that's what you said outright.
If it is true, anywhere, that a library pays a royalty on (say) per-check-out or per-year (as is true for some scientific journals!) this should be fixed. Libraries are a public resource. An important one, unless you like cultivating uneducated peasantry.
One thing I really like is that, according to the Time article (and written SW publications?) the Empire doesn't come and attack the Republic. The Empire IS the Republic.
As an American trudging through 2002 I seriously like the idea that Lucas is using the mass media to put forth THIS idea for people to think about: that the well intentioned Republic can turn into the Empire through expansion, greed and expediency.
With any kind of luck WE won't have storm troopers by the time the sixth film is out...
A James Brown record is a tangible asset- it has USE besides just sitting there being an artwork. You can shake your butt to it, get up offa that thing and move. It has FUNCTION besides just being the record of someone having 'arted'.
If you could clone anything and everything freely at no cost, a James Brown record would be MORE useful than a pyramid- because you can't dance to a pyramid. What good is it? What do you DO with it?
If you were writing a novel and, while you were entitled to recognition as the true author of it, anyone could copy the words of it and read it whenever they wanted, what use is the publisher? That is what publishers are FOR, and if they are not necessary, what is the point? If you never show your novel to anyone and it remains uncopied, have you gained anything? If you show it to everyone and half the world ends up reading it and begging you for more, have you lost anything?
The question to ask is this: given the eventual total failure of distribution control, what will happen next? What is left, and who has the power when distribution controllers finally lose it?
My money is not on creators and artists- I'm betting on promoters. We'll see... because distribution control WILL die in the long run.
It's a matter of technology. Imagine how much water leaks out of a pinhole in a water glass. Now imagine how much water leaks out of a pinhole at the bottom of Boulder Dam... we're heading towards 'how much water leaks out of a pinhole under the pressure of a contained million megaton atomic explosion', or beyond. Given the increases in technology and information distribution, the speed and bandwidth and storage, distribution control can't possibly survive...
How many full-length feature films will you be able to store on _discardable_ media (not 100$ hard drive analogs but 2$ CDR analogs)... in 2020? How many full-length feature films will you be able to download per minute?
Re:Does she understand open source/GPL at all?
on
The Culture of CD Burning
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Really.
Go to the URL right next to my 'user 580 info' there and you will find music you can download and KEEP, for free. Go to the artwork section and you'll find the COVERS for burning free CDs of the different albums. And all those 'buy now' buttons and crap are for ACTUAL RED BOOK COMPLIANT NEVER-BEEN-COMPRESSED HIGH-RESOLUTION-MASTER CDS. Real CDs done right.
And on every CD is written: please copy this CD for your friends.
The CDs have bonus tracks, every time- and why not? But I totally encourage people to rip the CDs in any format you'd like to see around- 256K mp3? Ogg Vorbis? WMA, which I despise? Go nuts, you are free to do so! And then share the fsckers on Gnutella or whatever else pleases you. I mean it.
There are some artists (while he lived, John Lennon was very much one of them) for whom living right is more important than kaching! Mind you, if I wanted to get economically raped, I'd solicit a major label contract instead of keeping rights to my own work;) but you HAVE to be able to imagine where all this is heading.
In a world where digital information is completely fluid, trying to fix a representation of the information is absolutely pointless. It's fucking crazy is what it is, excuse the strong language. It is the equivalent of wanting to charge for individual electrons in the electricity that powers your house. It's wanting to charge for water molecules in a rainstorm in the middle of the ocean. (damn good analogy actually, as most of the water is undrinkable, the value of really good water is high, yet it's falling from the sky all around you anyhow)
When ultimate broadband, ultimate storage, ultimate compression and encoding and playback happen, what will we have then? You will log onto the internet and someone will put up a file on a website or whatever. "Recorded Music (235T)" Oh, it's the archive of the complete history of recorded music! 235 terabytes. Gee, that's only a five minute download, *click* and so you have the history of recorded music on your Holo-Uber-Optical-Drive.
Now what?
The kind of incredible, unbelievable liquidity of information we're headed for (quick question: over your current modem or broadband, how long does it take you to download more written text literature than you could ever possibly read in your life?) changes the whole concept of the entertainment industry. It is no longer a one-to-many situation. Information storage and processing is expanding so fast that the new problem is not distribution, but overchoice.
At Ampcast, I have an album that is 'noise' music. It's the raging shrieks and staticy roars of a processed shortwave radio picking up things like satellites and atmospheric disturbances. Some people really like this kind of stuff, but most sane people would hate it. Some people really hate Britney Spears but most sane people would acknowledge the cynical competence of her production and tap their foot along to the artifical pop tripe. Yet, in data form, both sorts of music take up about the same number of bytes. And not only that, but an increasingly manageable number of bytes- no sort of problem to keep around. The future will mean you will have every imaginable music and film at your fingertips- and the question will not be 'how can I get this', but 'what do I actually like?'
In the past it was difficult enough to deliver music, that you had to go with what would appeal to a broad cross-section of people. This problem is DEAD... so on the one hand the future contains an ever-widening bunch of genres and musical/artistic styles (try understanding modern electronic dance music forms! Incredible forking and proliferation of distinct stylized forms...) and on the other hand it becomes virtually impossible to sort out what actually interests you from the 20 million other musics and arts that don't do anything for you...
If the entertainment industry had any clue at all they'd be trying to get a handle on this. What they're actually doing, for instance by cracking down on webcasting that tries to intelligently predict listener tastes, is destroy it. But they CANNOT destroy the need for it- because with information as liquid as it's gonna be, the amount of overchoice produces a compelling need for this new approach.
We will end up with a succession of entirely synthetic (possibly CGI!) worldwide superstars- whose appeal is so relentlessly broad that it has no depth or staying power at all- and everything else will be CHAOS... and choice. And just a hint of that meritocracy that the entertainment industry's been outgrowing.
I just finished the first version of a screenplay-writing program- basically a 'screenplay processor'- doesn't write anything itself, but switches around among the different 'blocks' of screenplay you need, managing margins and indentations, doubling spaces after punctuation, punching in slug lines and the spacing for dialogue cues, intelligently spacing between lines etc. The research on this format was really the hardest part, then it was just a matter of sorting out the guts of the program and the interface, the latter being overwhelmingly important. It had to know what you were doing and race ahead of you, slamming in all sorts of preformatted macros and always ending up in the right place, with the right formatting, to continue directly.
So- it did require 'the zone' to write this program.
What ended up happening was- the program was researched first, and then written over two nights. The first night, it was a dead-end. I wanted to use a certain technique, and was hitting walls all over the place. At the end of the night, I just put the program aside, and then I did other things for a while, consciously putting the project on the back burner, because I just _knew_ it needed to simmer a bit. It was so ready, and yet- it wasn't coming out right, not yet. It needed to stew impatiently and NOT be worked on for a day.
After that short break, I went back and took some different approaches, got up a head of steam, hassled with some bizarre bugs (too many objects updating themselves in various ways...) and bam! I had a working version.
I'd say a very important part of working 'in the zone' if that's the way you work, is being allowed and able to step AWAY from the zone and go do other things or even do nothing for a while. Not just hours, even days. I need to be able to do that. It may sound contradictory... *shrug*
The real irony here is that people respond to Katz as if he is a starving college journalist or something- when a bit of research will reveal that he was a television executive! Katz is a _suit_. And not just a suit, but a _TV_ _executive_ suit.
Shocked, shocked I am that he likes truly idiotic movies;)
The terms of MSFT's license are not temporary. Once you've agreed to them, it is a permanent legal admission you've made. The GPL does NOT contain any such term or condition, because it is only interested with locking down the code- you might say, locking the door OPEN. The GPL isn't interested in the coder.
MSFT's current licensing is only interested in locking down the coder. It doesn't give a crap about the code! They really don't care that much whether they have your code or not- they want to neutralize any patents you might have in respect to them, they want to get some legally admissible statements about how you have seen their IP yet concede that you have no right to it, and their licensing does all these things. It is only interested in locking down the coder. TOTALLY different approach to the 'viral' license. You might say the 'viral' license isn't inherently good or bad, it's all in what you propagate using it. GPL propagates compulsory freedom for those who use its code, and otherwise ignores you. MSFT doesn't care so much what happens to the code, but deftly places you under LEGAL CONDITIONS which they can use to shut you down at any time.
I'm not really a coder. I daresay I'd be a hell of a good software DESIGNER, and I turned out to be quite good at evaluating algorithms in DSP and sorting out which ones sound great and/or perform great under FFT waveform analysis. But I'm not a coder.
I've been using 'REALbasic' for years- in fact, since it was a one-person project named 'CrossBasic'. I gleefully endorse it for non-programmers or semi-programmers on the Mac who need to be able to express their ideas in software, but it's really not the same as C hacking: what I need is to do my DSP realtime with direct sound output, and REALbasic is completely incapable of that. I get up to 20% realtime processing, and I happen to know that if I was polling the controls live rather than dumping them to local variables, it'd crash to 1% realtime or less- getting values from RB controls is _expensive_.
So, in a way I am a precursor of what is surely going to be a much greater problem- more people need to program than just programmers. I needed to program because I had to have state-of-the-art wordlength reduction and harmonic enhancement, and I understood how that was done. I don't understand interfacing with sound drivers, barely understand the AIFF file format, but I understand my problem set real well...
I hope in future, someday, the Linux world will have tools just as 'luser-friendly' as REALbasic is. And that's a funny way to put it, but I'm serious. You've got no idea if you haven't seen it. You can run the IDE, automatically get this window, resize it to whatever size you want, drag a bunch of 'parts' like buttons and editfields and radio buttons and checkboxes to the window like a PHB on quaaludes, RUN the thing just as it is without typing a line of code, and even BUILD a standalone program just from that, like a 'mockup', in which all the controls will work even though they don't do anything and you didn't write a line of code! Even things like radio buttons will automatically deselect when another related radio button is selected. Then you only need to figure out OOP-ness enough to put code in events like the 'action' event of a pushbutton, use stuff like the 'value' property of a checkbox or the 'text' property of an editfield which contains all the text currently in it (it cut/copy/pastes, accepts typing, scrolls etc. by itself) and write the functional aspects of your program.
Like I said, I am not actually a coder. I know _some_ things about coding, and I've had to become something of an optimization fiend to get the RB programs running effectively, but this is why I need to translate it all into C to be able to do realtime. And I'll need to be coding for sound drivers, threading for interface interactivity, and writing for OSX instead of OS8- so it ain't happening any time soon, I'm afraid. I CAN'T learn that overnight, and nobody is going to do it for me.
However, thanks to the FSF and the GPL, the concepts I'm dealing with are still part of the free software community- I just GPLed my realbasic code.:D not being a coder didn't have to stop me!
I am currently working on a film screenwriting 'screenplay-processor' along the same lines- also to be GPL as soon as I get something working. I do look forward to getting with OSX... but I can't just sit back and say 'they need to make this easier so I can do it!'. If that won't happen, I'll write Free software some other way.
Hee- I suppose some really large people HAVE 'stolen' Office, but of course what I meant to write was 'really large NUMBERS of people';)
Anyhow, see the point? Let's not be doing this with game consoles. Consoles are about having fun, and nothing about Microsoft is fun. Unless you're into BDSM, I suppose:)
Well, I sympathise with your desire. But smarten up:)
Look- Microsoft Office, Word etc. have long been copied. Really large people have 'stolen' these products, not EVEN paying Microsoft money for them, much less paying hundreds of dollars. So, since Microsoft clearly lost money on all those Office copyings, and weren't even paid AT ALL, clearly it's done them loads of damage, and that is why Word and Office never became successful products and we have the thriving office-software competitive market we have tod..
You might want to ask yourself whether selling a monoculture to the Third World to replace indigenous crops is really a good thing.
You might want to ask yourself what kind of pesticide, fertilizer etc. support these high yield first world crops need in order to grow.
You might want to ask yourself how many people you're ready to kill in your efforts to save them from having third-world level food supplies, which they generally do have.
You might want to read what this Indian scientist has to say on the matter. IP-wary slashdotters will be particularly interested as, in her talk, she covers her experience of an American company patenting an indigenous crop of her valley, Basmati rice, which grew in India for centuries. Reading her is amazing, she is so familiar with the intimate details of how 'globalization' is screwing India and destroying their economy. And well she should as she lives in India- but it behooves the rest of us to have SOME clue as well, or we'll just parrot off what we're told to believe, even if it kills people.
Sorry. But I've never been able to forget the reality of that 'better strain of rice' meme once I got a clue about it.
You know, it's very interesting how many people are running OSX on iMacs at 400Mhz or slower... I've been holding off on it because I'm only on a 9500 with half a gig of RAM, but I am running a 300Mhz G3 in it. Maybe it's time to have a look at it. Really the primary appeal of it for me is not performance, but porting the software I write for MacOS 8 over to it- which would be a hell of a task, a complete rewrite AND translation into C or some variant of it, but it would make everything much friendlier for a Linux port, which I'd love to see...
These are the people who put out Word 6, and you don't doubt that they will?
I'm not going to call you a liar, but I am going to ask you: is it thinkable to you that Microsoft might intentionally cripple their non-Windows product? They have before. They now have the Macintosh Business Unit- which is not a popular unit within Microsoft, and is under a lot of pressure to prove their loyalty to their parent company.
I think that it is very likely that the _coders_ in the MBU want very much to make the niftiest software they possibly can. I am not at all ready to conclude that they're allowed to do so in all cases. Years from now we might know what really happened in the MBU. Currently, thanks to many many years of justified Mac user suspicion and distrust, if the MBU is being pressured to cripple their software or put security holes in it, they ain't telling. And if they're doing the best they can- then they're probably having trouble keeping up with the feature creep of all MS products, and bogging down with that, since they do not have the option of coding a fast clean browser which sticks to web standards. That's not in Microsoft's agenda- you can't extend the web and make it proprietary if you're only implementing- the web.
When the things sit on shelves unsold, they cost Microsoft still more.
This is because not giving Microsoft any money to offset their costs, hurts them more than giving Microsoft money that doesn't completely offset their costs.
But if you want to organize people to go out there on a large scale and give Microsoft money, why, you go right ahead there. I'm sure they'll find things to do with it! Maybe they'll use the money you give them to come up with a plan to really hurt the (GPL) software license I like best and use. After all, it is not okay with them that I should just mind my own business and write code without paying attention to them. If you give them money maybe they can develop and fund programs that FORCE me to deal with them, such as using Passport for US national ID.
Okay, so I spoke too soon. When I said 'why you go right ahead there', cross that out and write 'are you fscking crazy?????':P
Well, it is. The thing to remember for geeks is this:
Geeks are ingenious. Geeks like, no, love saying things like, "It was really intended as a game console but a couple days of work, a new HD, some fiddly changes on the motherboard and it's a Linux box with super nVidia 3d acceleration!" Geeks might enjoy that even more than a proper Linux box.
However, the geek view on these things sometimes also includes the notion, "...and MS lose money on every one sold so you should make lots of these modded consoles!" Unfortunately, those who would like to see MS lose lots of money should consider this fact:
MS lose lots MORE money when the things sit on shelves like they were glued there- and this is happening.
The XBox is dying. All we need now is for MS to just TRY to stir up attention for XBox 2 and the XBox will _be_ an expensive failure for them.
Don't fsck that up by actually buying any of the things.
Not necessarily. mp3.com has been known to kick out artists and not pay them if the artist is earning too much:) after all, since 1999 or so, mp3.com IS RIAA in that they are owned outright by Vivendi.
The real independent music sites are now places like ampcast, javamusic, and electronicscene. The one I use is Ampcast, and my music page can be found by a sufficiently determined search next to my user #580 info:)
I'm by no means saying you're wrong to go shoveling through the music on mp3.com- I myself got some fantastic shakuhachi music there last year. Just know that mp3.com's probably one of the weakest indie sites out there (as well as being RIAA now). I'll give 'em this, however, the really specialized stuff is well represented.
Your privilege, but I admit to being baffled at a person who can look at the following two licenses:
A: uses 'viral' provisions so the only way to use the code is to propagate a requirement that the information has to stay out there and fluid- centering on the CODE
B: uses 'viral' provisions to establish vulnerabilities so Microsoft can sue you or shut you down at any point, making it impossible for infected DEVELOPERS to work except on sufferance of Microsoft, who gain the ability to ensure that PERSON never works in software again
...and say, "Gimme more of that second one! YUM YUM!"
You've got to be crazy, 'istartedi'. What the hell are you thinking? Do you understand the liability the Microsoft license places you under? Do you understand the points it makes attach to the developer and not the code? It's all very well them learning to do 'viral' licenses, but wouldn't it make an inkling of sense that you READ the fscking thing and understand what it says before you agree to it?
They don't want to STEAL your code. They write their own code, thank you.
They want to be able to say:
"*ahem* Your program is taking too much of our marketshare. Now, when you agreed to our shared source license, you agreed that you've seen our IP, and further agreed that you have no right to our IP, and further agreed that any patents you may have cannot be used to defend yourself against us. Therefore, kill your program."
"You heard us. Kill your program. Take it off the market or we sue for infringement of our intellectual property, using the admissions you have already made in assenting to our license."
Why should they steal your code when they can deep-six it just so long as you have been, at some time, exposed to 'Shared Source'?
We don't want to invalidate MS's licensing on the basis that it's unenforcable- it's analogous to the GPL in too many ways and to weaken one would be to weaken the other. If anything, we might want to invalidate Microsoft's right as a monopolist to engage in this type of licensing- particularly since the GPL is geared to weaken centralized power and control, and Microsoft's current license ideas use exactly the same mechanisms to _increase_ power and control.
Don't attack the mechanism, attack the agenda and the result...
Their recent licensing is VERY the same as GPL. It is 'viral' licensing for the purpose of propagating legal points.
The GPL propagates ability to redistribute and to get full access to source at all costs.
Microsoft's recent licensing propagates admissions that the developer agreeing to the license has seen Microsoft IP, admissions that the developer does not have rights to the Microsoft IP, and furthermore a legal waiver of patents and IP the developer may be holding in self-defense.
Bit of a difference there! But the core concept is the 'viral' propagation of legally binding points.
If they are so threatened by the game (GPL) we're playing already that they'll attempt measures this desperate AND copy key parts of it (viral licensing), why the hell would you even want to change your game to copy what they are only doing because they're threatened by your original strategy?
"Wow, Microsoft are so alarmed by what we do that they're panicking and doing really evil things! CURSE THEM! We must stop doing what works and start doing evil stuff ourselves to... um... explain this again please?"
My God, now that we're all the way through 'they ignore you' and 'they laugh at you' and much of the way through 'then they fight you', what kind of nonsense is this to change the strategy before we've gotten to 'then you win'?
Yaaaaay, let's 'fight' Microsoft's proprietary evils by taking the GPL and adding ways to restrict people from using code under it. Holy fucking unclear on the concept, Batman!
That is a totally unfree provision.
And it's totally unnecessary- because if such an OS in any way limits the total freedom of a GPL user (such as forbidding the user to copy any programs or some such nonsense) then the GPL itself ALREADY shuts off in protest. If anything restricts you in such a way that your freedom under the GPL to redistribute conflicts with other demands placed on you, you are not allowed to redistribute under the GPL! So if any system was truly closed enough to present a problem, and restricts users that seriously, it automatically terminates their rights under the GPL, which are all-or-nothing.
Just forget your idea for extra terms- for one, unless you're the original author, you have no right to add that to someone else's code and restrict their users against their will... and for two, even if you are the original author you're no lawyer and should not be trying to play one on Slashdot.
The GPL just as it is has inspired not only fear but also imitation from Microsoft. Don't even think about weakening it now, now that it's obviously revealing its true strength.
This is what Microsoft are currently doing, and why it's not safe to work with their code. They're doing embrace-and-extend again, masterfully IMHO, and instead of embracing the GPL's proliferating of code availability, they are embracing the viralness of the license.
And extending it, to propagate legal points that could be used to shut down anybody who's touched their code.
Is it so shocking that this makes them total hypocrites and evil besides? That's irrelevant- the point being, is this approach of theirs effective? And it could be very effective, particularly as they pump it into schools and devote all their energies to expanding the list of 'tainted' developers. The only antidote is exactly what they've had to do regarding the GPL- mistrust, avoid, and try to be convincingly innocent of even having looked at such code, for fear of the consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding was: libraries are a public resource, and they BUY BOOKS. When the book wears out completely, maybe they'll buy another book. You're making it sound like they pay a royalty- actually that's what you said outright.
If it is true, anywhere, that a library pays a royalty on (say) per-check-out or per-year (as is true for some scientific journals!) this should be fixed. Libraries are a public resource. An important one, unless you like cultivating uneducated peasantry.
As an American trudging through 2002 I seriously like the idea that Lucas is using the mass media to put forth THIS idea for people to think about: that the well intentioned Republic can turn into the Empire through expansion, greed and expediency.
With any kind of luck WE won't have storm troopers by the time the sixth film is out...
A James Brown record is a tangible asset- it has USE besides just sitting there being an artwork. You can shake your butt to it, get up offa that thing and move. It has FUNCTION besides just being the record of someone having 'arted'.
If you could clone anything and everything freely at no cost, a James Brown record would be MORE useful than a pyramid- because you can't dance to a pyramid. What good is it? What do you DO with it?
If you were writing a novel and, while you were entitled to recognition as the true author of it, anyone could copy the words of it and read it whenever they wanted, what use is the publisher? That is what publishers are FOR, and if they are not necessary, what is the point? If you never show your novel to anyone and it remains uncopied, have you gained anything? If you show it to everyone and half the world ends up reading it and begging you for more, have you lost anything?
The question to ask is this: given the eventual total failure of distribution control, what will happen next? What is left, and who has the power when distribution controllers finally lose it?
My money is not on creators and artists- I'm betting on promoters. We'll see... because distribution control WILL die in the long run.
It's a matter of technology. Imagine how much water leaks out of a pinhole in a water glass. Now imagine how much water leaks out of a pinhole at the bottom of Boulder Dam... we're heading towards 'how much water leaks out of a pinhole under the pressure of a contained million megaton atomic explosion', or beyond. Given the increases in technology and information distribution, the speed and bandwidth and storage, distribution control can't possibly survive...
How many full-length feature films will you be able to store on _discardable_ media (not 100$ hard drive analogs but 2$ CDR analogs)... in 2020? How many full-length feature films will you be able to download per minute?
Go to the URL right next to my 'user 580 info' there and you will find music you can download and KEEP, for free. Go to the artwork section and you'll find the COVERS for burning free CDs of the different albums. And all those 'buy now' buttons and crap are for ACTUAL RED BOOK COMPLIANT NEVER-BEEN-COMPRESSED HIGH-RESOLUTION-MASTER CDS. Real CDs done right.
And on every CD is written: please copy this CD for your friends.
The CDs have bonus tracks, every time- and why not? But I totally encourage people to rip the CDs in any format you'd like to see around- 256K mp3? Ogg Vorbis? WMA, which I despise? Go nuts, you are free to do so! And then share the fsckers on Gnutella or whatever else pleases you. I mean it.
There are some artists (while he lived, John Lennon was very much one of them) for whom living right is more important than kaching! Mind you, if I wanted to get economically raped, I'd solicit a major label contract instead of keeping rights to my own work ;) but you HAVE to be able to imagine where all this is heading.
In a world where digital information is completely fluid, trying to fix a representation of the information is absolutely pointless. It's fucking crazy is what it is, excuse the strong language. It is the equivalent of wanting to charge for individual electrons in the electricity that powers your house. It's wanting to charge for water molecules in a rainstorm in the middle of the ocean. (damn good analogy actually, as most of the water is undrinkable, the value of really good water is high, yet it's falling from the sky all around you anyhow)
When ultimate broadband, ultimate storage, ultimate compression and encoding and playback happen, what will we have then? You will log onto the internet and someone will put up a file on a website or whatever. "Recorded Music (235T)" Oh, it's the archive of the complete history of recorded music! 235 terabytes. Gee, that's only a five minute download, *click* and so you have the history of recorded music on your Holo-Uber-Optical-Drive.
Now what?
The kind of incredible, unbelievable liquidity of information we're headed for (quick question: over your current modem or broadband, how long does it take you to download more written text literature than you could ever possibly read in your life?) changes the whole concept of the entertainment industry. It is no longer a one-to-many situation. Information storage and processing is expanding so fast that the new problem is not distribution, but overchoice.
At Ampcast, I have an album that is 'noise' music. It's the raging shrieks and staticy roars of a processed shortwave radio picking up things like satellites and atmospheric disturbances. Some people really like this kind of stuff, but most sane people would hate it. Some people really hate Britney Spears but most sane people would acknowledge the cynical competence of her production and tap their foot along to the artifical pop tripe. Yet, in data form, both sorts of music take up about the same number of bytes. And not only that, but an increasingly manageable number of bytes- no sort of problem to keep around. The future will mean you will have every imaginable music and film at your fingertips- and the question will not be 'how can I get this', but 'what do I actually like?'
In the past it was difficult enough to deliver music, that you had to go with what would appeal to a broad cross-section of people. This problem is DEAD... so on the one hand the future contains an ever-widening bunch of genres and musical/artistic styles (try understanding modern electronic dance music forms! Incredible forking and proliferation of distinct stylized forms...) and on the other hand it becomes virtually impossible to sort out what actually interests you from the 20 million other musics and arts that don't do anything for you...
If the entertainment industry had any clue at all they'd be trying to get a handle on this. What they're actually doing, for instance by cracking down on webcasting that tries to intelligently predict listener tastes, is destroy it. But they CANNOT destroy the need for it- because with information as liquid as it's gonna be, the amount of overchoice produces a compelling need for this new approach.
We will end up with a succession of entirely synthetic (possibly CGI!) worldwide superstars- whose appeal is so relentlessly broad that it has no depth or staying power at all- and everything else will be CHAOS... and choice. And just a hint of that meritocracy that the entertainment industry's been outgrowing.
Music by this longwinded geek
Even less commercial music
Who told him he could sing?
Chris Johnson
So- it did require 'the zone' to write this program.
What ended up happening was- the program was researched first, and then written over two nights. The first night, it was a dead-end. I wanted to use a certain technique, and was hitting walls all over the place. At the end of the night, I just put the program aside, and then I did other things for a while, consciously putting the project on the back burner, because I just _knew_ it needed to simmer a bit. It was so ready, and yet- it wasn't coming out right, not yet. It needed to stew impatiently and NOT be worked on for a day.
After that short break, I went back and took some different approaches, got up a head of steam, hassled with some bizarre bugs (too many objects updating themselves in various ways...) and bam! I had a working version.
I'd say a very important part of working 'in the zone' if that's the way you work, is being allowed and able to step AWAY from the zone and go do other things or even do nothing for a while. Not just hours, even days. I need to be able to do that. It may sound contradictory... *shrug*
(heh, 'insightful'? 'this is kinda like shakespeare for our time' constitutes 'insightful'?)
Shocked, shocked I am that he likes truly idiotic movies ;)
The terms of MSFT's license are not temporary. Once you've agreed to them, it is a permanent legal admission you've made. The GPL does NOT contain any such term or condition, because it is only interested with locking down the code- you might say, locking the door OPEN. The GPL isn't interested in the coder.
MSFT's current licensing is only interested in locking down the coder. It doesn't give a crap about the code! They really don't care that much whether they have your code or not- they want to neutralize any patents you might have in respect to them, they want to get some legally admissible statements about how you have seen their IP yet concede that you have no right to it, and their licensing does all these things. It is only interested in locking down the coder. TOTALLY different approach to the 'viral' license. You might say the 'viral' license isn't inherently good or bad, it's all in what you propagate using it. GPL propagates compulsory freedom for those who use its code, and otherwise ignores you. MSFT doesn't care so much what happens to the code, but deftly places you under LEGAL CONDITIONS which they can use to shut you down at any time.
Talk to a lawyer...
I'm not really a coder. I daresay I'd be a hell of a good software DESIGNER, and I turned out to be quite good at evaluating algorithms in DSP and sorting out which ones sound great and/or perform great under FFT waveform analysis. But I'm not a coder.
I've been using 'REALbasic' for years- in fact, since it was a one-person project named 'CrossBasic'. I gleefully endorse it for non-programmers or semi-programmers on the Mac who need to be able to express their ideas in software, but it's really not the same as C hacking: what I need is to do my DSP realtime with direct sound output, and REALbasic is completely incapable of that. I get up to 20% realtime processing, and I happen to know that if I was polling the controls live rather than dumping them to local variables, it'd crash to 1% realtime or less- getting values from RB controls is _expensive_.
So, in a way I am a precursor of what is surely going to be a much greater problem- more people need to program than just programmers. I needed to program because I had to have state-of-the-art wordlength reduction and harmonic enhancement, and I understood how that was done. I don't understand interfacing with sound drivers, barely understand the AIFF file format, but I understand my problem set real well...
I hope in future, someday, the Linux world will have tools just as 'luser-friendly' as REALbasic is. And that's a funny way to put it, but I'm serious. You've got no idea if you haven't seen it. You can run the IDE, automatically get this window, resize it to whatever size you want, drag a bunch of 'parts' like buttons and editfields and radio buttons and checkboxes to the window like a PHB on quaaludes, RUN the thing just as it is without typing a line of code, and even BUILD a standalone program just from that, like a 'mockup', in which all the controls will work even though they don't do anything and you didn't write a line of code! Even things like radio buttons will automatically deselect when another related radio button is selected. Then you only need to figure out OOP-ness enough to put code in events like the 'action' event of a pushbutton, use stuff like the 'value' property of a checkbox or the 'text' property of an editfield which contains all the text currently in it (it cut/copy/pastes, accepts typing, scrolls etc. by itself) and write the functional aspects of your program.
Like I said, I am not actually a coder. I know _some_ things about coding, and I've had to become something of an optimization fiend to get the RB programs running effectively, but this is why I need to translate it all into C to be able to do realtime. And I'll need to be coding for sound drivers, threading for interface interactivity, and writing for OSX instead of OS8- so it ain't happening any time soon, I'm afraid. I CAN'T learn that overnight, and nobody is going to do it for me.
However, thanks to the FSF and the GPL, the concepts I'm dealing with are still part of the free software community- I just GPLed my realbasic code. :D not being a coder didn't have to stop me!
I am currently working on a film screenwriting 'screenplay-processor' along the same lines- also to be GPL as soon as I get something working. I do look forward to getting with OSX... but I can't just sit back and say 'they need to make this easier so I can do it!'. If that won't happen, I'll write Free software some other way.
Anyhow, see the point? Let's not be doing this with game consoles. Consoles are about having fun, and nothing about Microsoft is fun. Unless you're into BDSM, I suppose :)
Look- Microsoft Office, Word etc. have long been copied. Really large people have 'stolen' these products, not EVEN paying Microsoft money for them, much less paying hundreds of dollars. So, since Microsoft clearly lost money on all those Office copyings, and weren't even paid AT ALL, clearly it's done them loads of damage, and that is why Word and Office never became successful products and we have the thriving office-software competitive market we have tod..
doh!
Get it?
You might want to ask yourself whether selling a monoculture to the Third World to replace indigenous crops is really a good thing.
You might want to ask yourself what kind of pesticide, fertilizer etc. support these high yield first world crops need in order to grow.
You might want to ask yourself how many people you're ready to kill in your efforts to save them from having third-world level food supplies, which they generally do have.
You might want to read what this Indian scientist has to say on the matter. IP-wary slashdotters will be particularly interested as, in her talk, she covers her experience of an American company patenting an indigenous crop of her valley, Basmati rice, which grew in India for centuries. Reading her is amazing, she is so familiar with the intimate details of how 'globalization' is screwing India and destroying their economy. And well she should as she lives in India- but it behooves the rest of us to have SOME clue as well, or we'll just parrot off what we're told to believe, even if it kills people.
Sorry. But I've never been able to forget the reality of that 'better strain of rice' meme once I got a clue about it.
You know, it's very interesting how many people are running OSX on iMacs at 400Mhz or slower... I've been holding off on it because I'm only on a 9500 with half a gig of RAM, but I am running a 300Mhz G3 in it. Maybe it's time to have a look at it. Really the primary appeal of it for me is not performance, but porting the software I write for MacOS 8 over to it- which would be a hell of a task, a complete rewrite AND translation into C or some variant of it, but it would make everything much friendlier for a Linux port, which I'd love to see...
I'm not going to call you a liar, but I am going to ask you: is it thinkable to you that Microsoft might intentionally cripple their non-Windows product? They have before. They now have the Macintosh Business Unit- which is not a popular unit within Microsoft, and is under a lot of pressure to prove their loyalty to their parent company.
I think that it is very likely that the _coders_ in the MBU want very much to make the niftiest software they possibly can. I am not at all ready to conclude that they're allowed to do so in all cases. Years from now we might know what really happened in the MBU. Currently, thanks to many many years of justified Mac user suspicion and distrust, if the MBU is being pressured to cripple their software or put security holes in it, they ain't telling. And if they're doing the best they can- then they're probably having trouble keeping up with the feature creep of all MS products, and bogging down with that, since they do not have the option of coding a fast clean browser which sticks to web standards. That's not in Microsoft's agenda- you can't extend the web and make it proprietary if you're only implementing- the web.
When the things sit on shelves unsold, they cost Microsoft still more.
This is because not giving Microsoft any money to offset their costs, hurts them more than giving Microsoft money that doesn't completely offset their costs.
But if you want to organize people to go out there on a large scale and give Microsoft money, why, you go right ahead there. I'm sure they'll find things to do with it! Maybe they'll use the money you give them to come up with a plan to really hurt the (GPL) software license I like best and use. After all, it is not okay with them that I should just mind my own business and write code without paying attention to them. If you give them money maybe they can develop and fund programs that FORCE me to deal with them, such as using Passport for US national ID.
Okay, so I spoke too soon. When I said 'why you go right ahead there', cross that out and write 'are you fscking crazy?????' :P
Geeks are ingenious. Geeks like, no, love saying things like, "It was really intended as a game console but a couple days of work, a new HD, some fiddly changes on the motherboard and it's a Linux box with super nVidia 3d acceleration!" Geeks might enjoy that even more than a proper Linux box.
However, the geek view on these things sometimes also includes the notion, "...and MS lose money on every one sold so you should make lots of these modded consoles!" Unfortunately, those who would like to see MS lose lots of money should consider this fact:
MS lose lots MORE money when the things sit on shelves like they were glued there- and this is happening.
The XBox is dying. All we need now is for MS to just TRY to stir up attention for XBox 2 and the XBox will _be_ an expensive failure for them.
Don't fsck that up by actually buying any of the things.
The real independent music sites are now places like ampcast, javamusic, and electronicscene. The one I use is Ampcast, and my music page can be found by a sufficiently determined search next to my user #580 info :)
I'm by no means saying you're wrong to go shoveling through the music on mp3.com- I myself got some fantastic shakuhachi music there last year. Just know that mp3.com's probably one of the weakest indie sites out there (as well as being RIAA now). I'll give 'em this, however, the really specialized stuff is well represented.
You've got to be crazy, 'istartedi'. What the hell are you thinking? Do you understand the liability the Microsoft license places you under? Do you understand the points it makes attach to the developer and not the code? It's all very well them learning to do 'viral' licenses, but wouldn't it make an inkling of sense that you READ the fscking thing and understand what it says before you agree to it?
That would be great if the Free Software community was about withholding...
They want to be able to say: "*ahem* Your program is taking too much of our marketshare. Now, when you agreed to our shared source license, you agreed that you've seen our IP, and further agreed that you have no right to our IP, and further agreed that any patents you may have cannot be used to defend yourself against us. Therefore, kill your program."
"You heard us. Kill your program. Take it off the market or we sue for infringement of our intellectual property, using the admissions you have already made in assenting to our license."
Why should they steal your code when they can deep-six it just so long as you have been, at some time, exposed to 'Shared Source'?
Don't attack the mechanism, attack the agenda and the result...
The GPL propagates ability to redistribute and to get full access to source at all costs.
Microsoft's recent licensing propagates admissions that the developer agreeing to the license has seen Microsoft IP, admissions that the developer does not have rights to the Microsoft IP, and furthermore a legal waiver of patents and IP the developer may be holding in self-defense.
Bit of a difference there! But the core concept is the 'viral' propagation of legally binding points.
"Wow, Microsoft are so alarmed by what we do that they're panicking and doing really evil things! CURSE THEM! We must stop doing what works and start doing evil stuff ourselves to... um... explain this again please?"
My God, now that we're all the way through 'they ignore you' and 'they laugh at you' and much of the way through 'then they fight you', what kind of nonsense is this to change the strategy before we've gotten to 'then you win'?
Yaaaaay, let's 'fight' Microsoft's proprietary evils by taking the GPL and adding ways to restrict people from using code under it. Holy fucking unclear on the concept, Batman!
That is a totally unfree provision.
And it's totally unnecessary- because if such an OS in any way limits the total freedom of a GPL user (such as forbidding the user to copy any programs or some such nonsense) then the GPL itself ALREADY shuts off in protest. If anything restricts you in such a way that your freedom under the GPL to redistribute conflicts with other demands placed on you, you are not allowed to redistribute under the GPL! So if any system was truly closed enough to present a problem, and restricts users that seriously, it automatically terminates their rights under the GPL, which are all-or-nothing.
Just forget your idea for extra terms- for one, unless you're the original author, you have no right to add that to someone else's code and restrict their users against their will... and for two, even if you are the original author you're no lawyer and should not be trying to play one on Slashdot.
The GPL just as it is has inspired not only fear but also imitation from Microsoft. Don't even think about weakening it now, now that it's obviously revealing its true strength.
This is what Microsoft are currently doing, and why it's not safe to work with their code. They're doing embrace-and-extend again, masterfully IMHO, and instead of embracing the GPL's proliferating of code availability, they are embracing the viralness of the license.
And extending it, to propagate legal points that could be used to shut down anybody who's touched their code.
Is it so shocking that this makes them total hypocrites and evil besides? That's irrelevant- the point being, is this approach of theirs effective? And it could be very effective, particularly as they pump it into schools and devote all their energies to expanding the list of 'tainted' developers. The only antidote is exactly what they've had to do regarding the GPL- mistrust, avoid, and try to be convincingly innocent of even having looked at such code, for fear of the consequences.