I'm looking at the 533 mhz going, 'hm, econo-box testing? I remember when this company was going to put out 604s at that clock rate' and then I realise that is the BUS...
I'm right now processing a track from 24 bit to 16 for an album remastering I'm doing, in the background, while reading slashdot, and my _CPU_ is barely as fast as the _bus_ of whatever they're looking at. My bus is more like 33mhz I think...
If I can do this and not think too much of it, no wonder they're not going to sell one to me... I think I'm going to be waiting around for another year or so and then picking up one of the ol' blue and white G4s maybe... gotta love being several years behind the curve, you get the same amount done but for way cheaper. That will be the point when I start running OSX and programming in something more portable to Linux and BSDs... by then I ought to be up to speed with that...
And now DAT is more or less dead... which is another note we can take from the history of a commercially unsuccessful product.
Namely- if these guys are going to carry on like this, save your money- their product's gonna die, and it'll be THEIR loss if you have the sense to ignore them.
Because in order to SELL a new version they've got to be coming up with new 'features' to do new and different things.
Unfortunately for them, Photoshop has been damned near utterly feature complete for fine-arts and professional prepress work since what, version 3? I use version 4, which is faintly less stable but includes layers and the layers palette- and that includes ALL the high-end stuff like CMYK work, LAB colorspace for conversions, duotones/tritones/quadtones, the full gamut of overlay/brush modes: all the deep stuff.
It's a hell of a lot like, say, GCC versus some version of Visual Basic that keeps coming out with more pre-built controls: GCC is more 'pro level' but is a working environment way beyond a list of 'features' that it can do. Hell, in Photoshop 4 you could say there are no 'framing' features, you know, those 'make a button for your web page' things that put your image on a bevel or some other embossing effect? Yet through layers, layer position offsets, overlay modes and channel operations you automatically have ALL POSSIBLE 'framing' results, and it's down to how you use them, producing a creative work rather than running some plugin...
Which brings us right back to the original question: once they've sold that, and sold it under a license that allows people to use their copy forever without it expiring, how do they expect to sell it over again? The answer is convenience features, and _supplying_ those 'plugins' so people, given the opportunity for complete flexibility, can get lazy and quit bothering.
Finally, Adobe's actual programming is not that bad for a proprietary software vendor- so they're stuck trying to overcomplicate their code by building in all sorts of 'convenience' short cuts and feature after feature, but they are still making an effort to not crash like a Microsoft program. And that answers your question: they probably could have coded up a version of Photoshop 4 for OSX without too much heartache, but they felt a need to both do that and to up the feature list enough to compel upgrades.
Interestingly this is not confined solely to proprietary guys. I'm facing a very similar situation with "Mastering Tools". As I keep pursuing newer versions (this is a GPLed project, not for pay) I keep coming up with new variations on dithers, new controls for tone shaping etc. and the temptation is to include everything- making the program bloated and unwieldy. Instead I've done some pruning- but I definitely feel the desire to be able to say 'hey, NEW thing! Check out the new thing you can do now!'. If I do, can you imagine how much more pressure the Adobe guys feel?
Yeah, but if Slashdot-sized audiences were hitting my Ampcast page to listen to my latest music, it is VERY LIKELY that some of them would be buying the CD. That pays bills.
With Airwindows.com, a lot of that is my audio mastering software. If Slashdot-sized audiences were hitting that, there's a good chance I could get some mastering business through that connection. That pays bills.
Given that the Internet is _about_ information, does that really mean you _have_ to be able to distribute Slashdot-sized amounts of information for free? Nobody's worried about little niche Geocities sites: and places like Google can cover for 'em sometimes with caches if there's a random spike in the site-visitor stats. Is it really necessary to have a plan for being able to afford massive bandwidth for every little information site out there?
The deal is, the first is my web hosting and the second is my music. If you visit them, YOU do not pay- it's like a printed fanzine or something, I pay for the hosting.
I understand that bandwidth costs muchos, but I still dislike the idea of being charged solely for information- particularly if I'm not keeping it around. I pay for paper magazines- MacAddict, Cinefex- but those are kept. Someone had to print 'em up. Even then, they're heavily paid for by advertisers...
I just think some people are imagining a heavenly land where everyone on the Internet is paying them a penny because they're so wonderful, and this is wishful thinking... in order to charge people you gotta really be GIVING them something, and it's not enough to just have good information. There's tons of information, everywhere. What else ya got?
I've been using OMDs (internet Original Music Distributors) for some time now- was with mp3.com for a while until they got bought out by Vivendi and changed their contract in really negative ways, have stuff on BeSonic, and now I'm setting up shop on Ampcast.com.
I get FIVE CENTS per full download from Ampcast. (This is why they have you register- otherwise artists would cheat)
That is more than twenty times the royalty the RIAA is willing to pay...
Why, how? First, Ampcast really wants to be selling its CDs (a primary reason I like them so much is that they burn-to-order from genuine (rippable) Red Book CDs. The one I have for sale there is a Red Book, full 44.1/16 from high-resolution masters (done with my GPL mastering software Mastering Tools), I'm trying to negotiate a cooler tray-liner artwork but it's 'live' and buyable right now. If you buy one, I get a few bucks, and Ampcast gets a few bucks, and the RIAA gets absolutely fscking nada, zip, zilch, zero, thank you for playing. Secondly, Ampcast ain't a free OMD or trying to be one. It charges a fee like a hosting service, and that's where those five centses come from, plus from the CD sales. They're good that way- they have sense and have managed their budgeting intelligently so they have control of their business.
I'm still putting up other work and remastering my back catalog, but go check out 'Full Day', buy the CD (with a little bonus track not listed on the page) if you like it. And then ask yourself: is it fair that RIAA major label artists get a less than a twentieth of the download-royalty I'm getting from Ampcast? That _stinks_. The RIAA has _more_ money than Ampcast! They could well afford to do a HELL of a lot better than that. It's pathetic, outrageous, insulting. I'm not saying my music isn't as good- I put a lot of work into it- but TWENTY times as good? I think NOT... yet that's the discrepancy in pay.
By the way, if you don't like the idea of me getting paid off downloads, the streaming plays don't pay anything, you could check out those. Or, if there are people who've bought the CD, I write right on it "please copy this CD for your friends" and it's totally rippable, so you could look for the tracks on Gnutella or something- I hope people do share my music that way. If someone has a problem with dealing with Ampcast registration etc. and wouldn't buy my CD anyway, they should still be able to have mp3s of it... I don't need their nickel that badly that I should insist on putting them through a hassle...
Straight 'tragedy of the commons'. If.0001% of humans on planet earth need to make money by any means available no matter what, and they all spam, and they eventually become able to send 2 emails a second to everybody on the planet, then they _do_ make money up to the point where the system breaks down completely, and nobody can use email anymore because 99.9999999% of it is spam.
It is possible that the whole concept of email will fail because of this: that any form of 'talk to people by offering them your contact information on a global scale' will fail. It simply depends on what the rules of the 'system' are, and what the limits of the system are. With computers and networking and delivery of information to be stored and read later, the limits are very extreme- it's not at all like trying to initiate chat or telemarketing where the victim can only be available to one attack at a time. Email stores: email networks, it's extremely vulnerable to this sort of thing.
Personally, I make a point of not attempting to initiate business contacts by email for any reason whatsoever. I have a feeling this may be the future: that either the system will collapse completely under the mass of people with 'valid reasons' for wanting to make you an offer (do you know how many people I _could_ 'validly' make an offer via email, even in a rather targeted manner? Even on an entirely personal, one-hand-written-at-a-time basis?), or it will become so completely defensive that it's barely email anymore.
It's not about how well you can 'spamproof' an email address. It's about how willing you are to be made offers by everybody else in 'contact distance' from you, in other words in the entire world.
There are enough people out there in the big wide world that even if you only heard from people with stuff YOU WANT, or information YOU WANT, just only the stuff that you'd PAY for to hear about, even then you would still be overwhelmed completely and unable to function. 'Global village' means 'billions and billions of neighbors'...
Re:Did anyone else happen to read these lines...
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.NETly News
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Yes, it really is Bill, and yes, it really is Microsoft. Their whole approach is qualitatively different from most of the poor saps out there who thought it would be good to just produce good software and see if anybody buys it. Gates' level of megalomania is genuinely unusual for a CEO, and his degree of dissatisfaction with even the incredible monopoly he's built is still more unusual. If he _did_ end up controlling utterly the wearable computer everyone in the world was required to wear, with all other software not only impossible but illegal, he would still not be satisfied. And this is the mainspring that caused Microsoft to dump many times the 'soft money' into the political system than even Enron did, that has them playing truly dangerous games with their accounting practices to present infallible stock market performance, that has caused them to outright defy even the court system of the United States (which _is_ backed by guns and tanks and things, you know). Hell, through the BSA they use US Marshals as their own private army...
I'm sorry. They are DIFFERENT from those around them. They are as different as John Dillinger- and have had roughly the same sort of success.
Please pre-emptively moderate this down as a flame, because it is a flame of the flamiest flamishness... thank you... now:
Could all the young cynic types, who don't have to deal with the consequences of their cynicism just yet and enjoy trying to look with-it and cool by remarking how 'everybody does this so what's the problem', please-
attain equal cynicism on the odds of your having any sort of decent life
attain equal cynicism on environmental affairs
attain equal cynicism on public safety
attain equal cynicism on the safety of the very food you eat
attain equal cynicism on the medical industry being too busy inventing penis-hardening drugs to save you when you're discouraged, choked with smog, run over and poisoned, and
die?
(since you're gonna die anyway, why mess things up for the rest of us with your cynicism and opinions on what WE should tolerate in our environment, our government, and the corporations we allow to operate?)
:D
Then, we can feed you to the poor and you'll be good for something at last!:D
The impressive parts are that (A) Microsoft keeps finding new offensive behaviors that people hadn't even thought to make illegal because it would take absurd amounts of malice and resources (yeah, let's buy out ALL THE LAWYERS so our opponents can't have any good ones), and (B) that they're choosing to do this despite the amount of financial waste involved. If they will do this, how much other money are they wasting on pointless things?
What, 'not having to pay for software'? 'intensive capitalization'? 'taking over the desktop'? 'getting into the Fortune 500 IT budgets'?
I'm sorry, but if you claim 'the definitions of free software and open source are virtually identical' it only proves:
you are on the 'Open Source' side of things, and
you aren't even paying attention.
Wanting to have your pet software project draw on the pool of OSS-friendly developers so it can be more competitive is NOT the same thing as understanding what free software is about.
Viewing the FSF as a 'competitor organisation' is a really lousy way of understanding it...
The fact is, Richard Stallman has had 'an organization with similar goals' obliterate all he cared about before. It happened to him over the MIT AI lab, with LISP machine companies, all dedicated to making terrific products, but destroying the ground they fought over.
To the extent that 'the Open Source organization' wishes to make _its_ strictly pragmatic approach convert people from the more idealistic and rigorous approach favored by Stallman, he is absolutely right to disparage it: it is susceptible to a form of attack (or entropy?) that Free Software is not. By placing practical considerations like ability to compete and gain mindshare in a marketplace ahead of the value of keeping information circulating free of controls, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Stallman has SEEN the failure of cooperation when money and power got involved, in the era of LISP machines. Why would he be less vigilant now, with even larger numbers of people involved and even more powerful commercial interests involved?
If Stallman were 'agnostic', I for one wouldn't pay attention to him. The Open Source people who are results-before-principles, I don't listen to either. Principles exist for a REASON, and Stallman is admirably consistent in his defence of them, which is why the guy has my loyalty- because I have his. The open source guys would sell me out in a nanosecond for more marketshare, foolishly believing THAT to be the prize, and making up reasons why it is better so.
Sincerity is no guarantee of correctness.
I'm sticking with Stallman, and he'll be 'marginalised' over my dead body and along with all MY code, thank you. Whatever gives you the notion that he's the only one with passionately held beliefs about the flow vs. restriction of information?
Microsoft people have ALWAYS liked 'this year's model' but thought everything that came before it is garbage.
This is NOT different from the MS rank and file. It is, instead, a perfect mimicking of their attitudes. In three years, when.NET is dead and they are pushing something 'new and revolutionary and completely different', if he's true to type he will like the new thing and think.NET is garbage...
...why not skip ahead and think it's garbage now, and save a lot of trouble?
...only because it was previously taken completely for granted, and not valued at all. The assumption was that people would share their information. Then, over a conflict between two different manufacturers of LISP machines, this assumption was obliterated- the field of battle was the MIT AI lab, the primary source of Stallman's original concept of 'free software' practice, which was destroyed.
The people hired by the companies were required to not share information with the competing company. They had no reason to question this. When new hackers came on the scene they were simply bought up by one or the other of the companies. The AI lab became empty, no hacking going on, no information being shared with others. It died. It was killed.
Stallman was racked with grief- and in the end, went out and codified a system by which free software COULD NOT be destroyed in that manner, using copyright to REQUIRE that the value of sharing be placed above the value of protecting a company's intellectual property. Rather than it being a personal value that could be easily swept aside, it became a licensing matter that can't legally be swept aside, establishing a body of work that is permanently 'shared' among participants in the concept of 'free software'.
THAT is what RMS invented. Before him, it was subject to human frailties, and as such it got steamrollered, because of 'tragedy of the commons' type difficulties. Non-GPL type free software doesn't scale: as it gains in importance, other interests eventually destroy the freeness. Only GPL-type free software can scale to where it is worth vast sums of money while preserving its information sharing fully. Even BSD licensing begins to lose information sharing as it becomes incorporated into proprietary work...
By contrast, Verizon recently decided to spam everybody and give them an opt-OUT. Let me tell you what it took to opt out (assuming it even worked!)
call them up and get the automated system
dial '1' for if you want to opt out or '2' if you have had second thoughts and want them to sell your information to everyone again
enter your full ten digit number
enter '1' if you did that correctly, or '2' if you need to go back and do it again
at the tone, speak your first name
enter '1' if you did that correctly, or '2' if you need to go back and do it again
at the tone, speak your last name
enter '1' if you did that correctly, or '2' if you need to go back and do it again
at the tone, speak your full billing address as shown on your bill
enter '1' if you did that correctly, or '2' if you need to go back and do it again
enter the first thirteen digits of your account number, being your ten digit number plus '002' or whatever
enter '1' if you did that correctly, or '2' if you need to go back and do it again
when prompted, make a voice recording saying 'Yes' to the question, do you want to opt out
enter '1' if you did that correctly, or '2' if you need to go back and do it again
enter '1' if you are finished with your interaction, or '2' if you, after doing all that, want to tell them to share your information for special offers instead...
AAAUUUUGGGGHHHH!
I may have got some details wrong but I'm not making this up- it was that bad. THANK YOU, Vermont, state I live in, for doing something to control these freaking maniacs... today the banking people, maybe tomorrow Verizon...
GNU was about replacing and existing independently of UNIX, where Miguel seems much more interested in being joined-at-the-hip with Microsoft and setting up a situation of very _intimate_ continual interaction. it's NOT at all the same thing as going 'let's do everything.NET does, only make an independent version just for us!'. If it was, I would be a LOT more sympathetic.
Miguel WANTS.NET to win and control computing.
If this was 20 years ago, Miguel would be trying to make AT&T UNIX win, and turning people away from the BSD fork... though oddly enough Linux is more SysVish, I'm told...
"Second, Miguel firmly believes that.NET programs will run on any.NET platform."
But it doesn't matter how firmly he believes this if he's flat wrong... this is exactly the problem, Dan. It's NOT that Miguel has bad motives (though some of his value system needs work!), the problem is that he's 'drinking the Kool-Aid', he is firmly believing things that aren't necessarily so.
That is dangerous, because on the one hand he's setting himself up to be very astonished when he is victimized, chewed up and spat out- and on the other hand, because of his genuine sincerity it's not safe to simply go by his confidence level. You have to question whether that confidence is misplaced.
"The.NET Framework will exist in the Windows world, and because of this they will be widely deployed. It is a pointless battle to pretend that boycotting the use of those technologies will have any kind of effect on their reach."
Um... wouldn't boycotting these technologies (such as they are) make their reach that much less than if you weren't boycotting them?
Weird to be seeing hardcore Microsoft propaganda from an open source project leader. Why doesn't he just go over to Microsoft and work for them if he wants their stuff deployed that much? Why is he even bothering to be involved with free software at all? Of course, didn't he also arrange to have a free project _drop_ the LGPL and go with a more proprietary-friendly arrangement? Who is this guy?
I was a bit surprised not to see, "The PS2's DirectX support just isn't there yet- in fact, Sony have not even pledged to commit to supporting it in future! This has to be considered a major drawback, that will slow and hobble PS2 development":D
To be fair, even though the graphics capabilities of X-Box are _not_ significantly superior to PS2 (largely because of the PS2 video bus being so outrageous that the VRAM is pretty much just a frame buffer), the reason the graphics of GT3 are so superior to say Gotham Racing is not a technical reason.
Whoever did GT3 had an artistic sense fit for working in film EFX, not just PC gaming, and used things like blur and desaturation to produce nearly photographic results. By contrast, Gotham is clearly (no pun intended!) about showing off as many polygons as possible, so it looks downright fake. Reality is dirty and often out of focus. The developers in the Microsoft camp are evidently not encouraged to understand this (it would make it look as if not as many polygons are in use!) so their output continually looks more like high-end 1995 raytracing. You go 'my, that must be a lot of polygons' and it looks real plastic.
I know. I just stopped reading the Tom's article less than halfway through it, for the pleasure of coming here and seeing people's incredulous reactions.
I think my favorite line was along the lines of 'of course, graphics quality is FAR superior to PS2'. Um, OK. Is that why Gotham Racing looks totally fake and computer-rendered and GT3 looks eerily photographic? Somebody's not using their freaking EYES. Mind you, that XBox fighting game looks very slick. Other games, like 'Shrek', look appalling- like 1999 PC games with more polygons.
I think it's quite laughable. If they want to seriously concern themselves with image quality they'd better put down the crack pipes, quit paying off hardware review sites for paid promotional materials masquerading as articles, and devote thought to current _EFX_ concepts like atmospheric effects, cinematography, haze etc. You DO NOT WIN by showing off how many polygons you have and how clear everything is. That's freaking 1995 GFX thinking. Sometimes you win by doing stuff that is actually very simple and easy, but in an artistic way...
I'm reminded of the book "Disney Animation: The Illusion Of Life" which goes into backgrounds at one point, and how the Disney animators often took pains to NOT depict the background with wizzy high fidelity and clarity... some effective backgrounds, shown in the book and used in feature films, were little more than blurs of color with bits of vague detail in them, and they worked perfectly in context.
It just furthers my opinion that Microsoft have all the artistic insight of Garth Brooks selling Dr. Pepper... and the companies that are making games for X-Box are largely being persuaded to on grounds of easiness, cheapness and (likely to be frustrated) greed. If that's the best they can do there's going to be a lot of really lame, undistinguished games out for X-Box that nobody will particularly want to play...
Avoid game cards. There's a recent Sound Blaster (Audigy?) that freaking _resamples_ all audio that passes through it to 48K and back again- insanity! When I was researching a new sound card purchase what I was hearing was: MAudio Delta (cheapest- Audiophile 2496, which I ended up getting- has Linux drivers, apparently!), Echo Layla, Echo Gina etc. If you want to get hardcore, RME Hammerfall. How many inputs do you need, what kind of breakout box, etc?
Come up with some prospective names and do a google _news_ search to see what people are saying about such cards in, say, rec.audio.pro. DON'T go by what you can find on the Web or on 'reviews'...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm right now processing a track from 24 bit to 16 for an album remastering I'm doing, in the background, while reading slashdot, and my _CPU_ is barely as fast as the _bus_ of whatever they're looking at. My bus is more like 33mhz I think...
If I can do this and not think too much of it, no wonder they're not going to sell one to me... I think I'm going to be waiting around for another year or so and then picking up one of the ol' blue and white G4s maybe... gotta love being several years behind the curve, you get the same amount done but for way cheaper. That will be the point when I start running OSX and programming in something more portable to Linux and BSDs... by then I ought to be up to speed with that...
Namely- if these guys are going to carry on like this, save your money- their product's gonna die, and it'll be THEIR loss if you have the sense to ignore them.
Unfortunately for them, Photoshop has been damned near utterly feature complete for fine-arts and professional prepress work since what, version 3? I use version 4, which is faintly less stable but includes layers and the layers palette- and that includes ALL the high-end stuff like CMYK work, LAB colorspace for conversions, duotones/tritones/quadtones, the full gamut of overlay/brush modes: all the deep stuff.
It's a hell of a lot like, say, GCC versus some version of Visual Basic that keeps coming out with more pre-built controls: GCC is more 'pro level' but is a working environment way beyond a list of 'features' that it can do. Hell, in Photoshop 4 you could say there are no 'framing' features, you know, those 'make a button for your web page' things that put your image on a bevel or some other embossing effect? Yet through layers, layer position offsets, overlay modes and channel operations you automatically have ALL POSSIBLE 'framing' results, and it's down to how you use them, producing a creative work rather than running some plugin...
Which brings us right back to the original question: once they've sold that, and sold it under a license that allows people to use their copy forever without it expiring, how do they expect to sell it over again? The answer is convenience features, and _supplying_ those 'plugins' so people, given the opportunity for complete flexibility, can get lazy and quit bothering.
Finally, Adobe's actual programming is not that bad for a proprietary software vendor- so they're stuck trying to overcomplicate their code by building in all sorts of 'convenience' short cuts and feature after feature, but they are still making an effort to not crash like a Microsoft program. And that answers your question: they probably could have coded up a version of Photoshop 4 for OSX without too much heartache, but they felt a need to both do that and to up the feature list enough to compel upgrades.
Interestingly this is not confined solely to proprietary guys. I'm facing a very similar situation with "Mastering Tools". As I keep pursuing newer versions (this is a GPLed project, not for pay) I keep coming up with new variations on dithers, new controls for tone shaping etc. and the temptation is to include everything- making the program bloated and unwieldy. Instead I've done some pruning- but I definitely feel the desire to be able to say 'hey, NEW thing! Check out the new thing you can do now!'. If I do, can you imagine how much more pressure the Adobe guys feel?
With Airwindows.com, a lot of that is my audio mastering software. If Slashdot-sized audiences were hitting that, there's a good chance I could get some mastering business through that connection. That pays bills.
Given that the Internet is _about_ information, does that really mean you _have_ to be able to distribute Slashdot-sized amounts of information for free? Nobody's worried about little niche Geocities sites: and places like Google can cover for 'em sometimes with caches if there's a random spike in the site-visitor stats. Is it really necessary to have a plan for being able to afford massive bandwidth for every little information site out there?
www.airwindows.com
www.ampcast.com/chrisj
The deal is, the first is my web hosting and the second is my music. If you visit them, YOU do not pay- it's like a printed fanzine or something, I pay for the hosting.
I understand that bandwidth costs muchos, but I still dislike the idea of being charged solely for information- particularly if I'm not keeping it around. I pay for paper magazines- MacAddict, Cinefex- but those are kept. Someone had to print 'em up. Even then, they're heavily paid for by advertisers...
I just think some people are imagining a heavenly land where everyone on the Internet is paying them a penny because they're so wonderful, and this is wishful thinking... in order to charge people you gotta really be GIVING them something, and it's not enough to just have good information. There's tons of information, everywhere. What else ya got?
I've been using OMDs (internet Original Music Distributors) for some time now- was with mp3.com for a while until they got bought out by Vivendi and changed their contract in really negative ways, have stuff on BeSonic, and now I'm setting up shop on Ampcast.com.
I get FIVE CENTS per full download from Ampcast. (This is why they have you register- otherwise artists would cheat)
That is more than twenty times the royalty the RIAA is willing to pay...
Why, how? First, Ampcast really wants to be selling its CDs (a primary reason I like them so much is that they burn-to-order from genuine (rippable) Red Book CDs. The one I have for sale there is a Red Book, full 44.1/16 from high-resolution masters (done with my GPL mastering software Mastering Tools), I'm trying to negotiate a cooler tray-liner artwork but it's 'live' and buyable right now. If you buy one, I get a few bucks, and Ampcast gets a few bucks, and the RIAA gets absolutely fscking nada, zip, zilch, zero, thank you for playing. Secondly, Ampcast ain't a free OMD or trying to be one. It charges a fee like a hosting service, and that's where those five centses come from, plus from the CD sales. They're good that way- they have sense and have managed their budgeting intelligently so they have control of their business.
I'm still putting up other work and remastering my back catalog, but go check out 'Full Day', buy the CD (with a little bonus track not listed on the page) if you like it. And then ask yourself: is it fair that RIAA major label artists get a less than a twentieth of the download-royalty I'm getting from Ampcast? That _stinks_. The RIAA has _more_ money than Ampcast! They could well afford to do a HELL of a lot better than that. It's pathetic, outrageous, insulting. I'm not saying my music isn't as good- I put a lot of work into it- but TWENTY times as good? I think NOT... yet that's the discrepancy in pay.
By the way, if you don't like the idea of me getting paid off downloads, the streaming plays don't pay anything, you could check out those. Or, if there are people who've bought the CD, I write right on it "please copy this CD for your friends" and it's totally rippable, so you could look for the tracks on Gnutella or something- I hope people do share my music that way. If someone has a problem with dealing with Ampcast registration etc. and wouldn't buy my CD anyway, they should still be able to have mp3s of it... I don't need their nickel that badly that I should insist on putting them through a hassle...
Evidently it is on loan from the White House because this President has no need for intelligence :D
Straight 'tragedy of the commons'. If .0001% of humans on planet earth need to make money by any means available no matter what, and they all spam, and they eventually become able to send 2 emails a second to everybody on the planet, then they _do_ make money up to the point where the system breaks down completely, and nobody can use email anymore because 99.9999999% of it is spam.
It is possible that the whole concept of email will fail because of this: that any form of 'talk to people by offering them your contact information on a global scale' will fail. It simply depends on what the rules of the 'system' are, and what the limits of the system are. With computers and networking and delivery of information to be stored and read later, the limits are very extreme- it's not at all like trying to initiate chat or telemarketing where the victim can only be available to one attack at a time. Email stores: email networks, it's extremely vulnerable to this sort of thing.
Personally, I make a point of not attempting to initiate business contacts by email for any reason whatsoever. I have a feeling this may be the future: that either the system will collapse completely under the mass of people with 'valid reasons' for wanting to make you an offer (do you know how many people I _could_ 'validly' make an offer via email, even in a rather targeted manner? Even on an entirely personal, one-hand-written-at-a-time basis?), or it will become so completely defensive that it's barely email anymore.
It's not about how well you can 'spamproof' an email address. It's about how willing you are to be made offers by everybody else in 'contact distance' from you, in other words in the entire world.
There are enough people out there in the big wide world that even if you only heard from people with stuff YOU WANT, or information YOU WANT, just only the stuff that you'd PAY for to hear about, even then you would still be overwhelmed completely and unable to function. 'Global village' means 'billions and billions of neighbors'...
I'm sorry. They are DIFFERENT from those around them. They are as different as John Dillinger- and have had roughly the same sort of success.
Could all the young cynic types, who don't have to deal with the consequences of their cynicism just yet and enjoy trying to look with-it and cool by remarking how 'everybody does this so what's the problem', please-
(since you're gonna die anyway, why mess things up for the rest of us with your cynicism and opinions on what WE should tolerate in our environment, our government, and the corporations we allow to operate?)
Then, we can feed you to the poor and you'll be good for something at last! :D
What, 'not having to pay for software'? 'intensive capitalization'? 'taking over the desktop'? 'getting into the Fortune 500 IT budgets'?
I'm sorry, but if you claim 'the definitions of free software and open source are virtually identical' it only proves:
Wanting to have your pet software project draw on the pool of OSS-friendly developers so it can be more competitive is NOT the same thing as understanding what free software is about.
Viewing the FSF as a 'competitor organisation' is a really lousy way of understanding it...
The fact is, Richard Stallman has had 'an organization with similar goals' obliterate all he cared about before. It happened to him over the MIT AI lab, with LISP machine companies, all dedicated to making terrific products, but destroying the ground they fought over.
To the extent that 'the Open Source organization' wishes to make _its_ strictly pragmatic approach convert people from the more idealistic and rigorous approach favored by Stallman, he is absolutely right to disparage it: it is susceptible to a form of attack (or entropy?) that Free Software is not. By placing practical considerations like ability to compete and gain mindshare in a marketplace ahead of the value of keeping information circulating free of controls, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Stallman has SEEN the failure of cooperation when money and power got involved, in the era of LISP machines. Why would he be less vigilant now, with even larger numbers of people involved and even more powerful commercial interests involved?
If Stallman were 'agnostic', I for one wouldn't pay attention to him. The Open Source people who are results-before-principles, I don't listen to either. Principles exist for a REASON, and Stallman is admirably consistent in his defence of them, which is why the guy has my loyalty- because I have his. The open source guys would sell me out in a nanosecond for more marketshare, foolishly believing THAT to be the prize, and making up reasons why it is better so.
Sincerity is no guarantee of correctness.
I'm sticking with Stallman, and he'll be 'marginalised' over my dead body and along with all MY code, thank you. Whatever gives you the notion that he's the only one with passionately held beliefs about the flow vs. restriction of information?
This is NOT different from the MS rank and file. It is, instead, a perfect mimicking of their attitudes. In three years, when .NET is dead and they are pushing something 'new and revolutionary and completely different', if he's true to type he will like the new thing and think .NET is garbage...
The people hired by the companies were required to not share information with the competing company. They had no reason to question this. When new hackers came on the scene they were simply bought up by one or the other of the companies. The AI lab became empty, no hacking going on, no information being shared with others. It died. It was killed.
Stallman was racked with grief- and in the end, went out and codified a system by which free software COULD NOT be destroyed in that manner, using copyright to REQUIRE that the value of sharing be placed above the value of protecting a company's intellectual property. Rather than it being a personal value that could be easily swept aside, it became a licensing matter that can't legally be swept aside, establishing a body of work that is permanently 'shared' among participants in the concept of 'free software'.
THAT is what RMS invented. Before him, it was subject to human frailties, and as such it got steamrollered, because of 'tragedy of the commons' type difficulties. Non-GPL type free software doesn't scale: as it gains in importance, other interests eventually destroy the freeness. Only GPL-type free software can scale to where it is worth vast sums of money while preserving its information sharing fully. Even BSD licensing begins to lose information sharing as it becomes incorporated into proprietary work...
By contrast, Verizon recently decided to spam everybody and give them an opt-OUT. Let me tell you what it took to opt out (assuming it even worked!)
AAAUUUUGGGGHHHH!
I may have got some details wrong but I'm not making this up- it was that bad. THANK YOU, Vermont, state I live in, for doing something to control these freaking maniacs... today the banking people, maybe tomorrow Verizon...
One wonders if he would like to be paid by Microsoft to do the controlling or killing of Mono.
Microsoft's generosity
*snrk*
And you sound _serious_, too. It's hard to know whether to be amused or appalled...
Never mind KDE, what would the Microsoft people have to say about that?
Miguel WANTS .NET to win and control computing.
If this was 20 years ago, Miguel would be trying to make AT&T UNIX win, and turning people away from the BSD fork... though oddly enough Linux is more SysVish, I'm told...
But it doesn't matter how firmly he believes this if he's flat wrong... this is exactly the problem, Dan. It's NOT that Miguel has bad motives (though some of his value system needs work!), the problem is that he's 'drinking the Kool-Aid', he is firmly believing things that aren't necessarily so.
That is dangerous, because on the one hand he's setting himself up to be very astonished when he is victimized, chewed up and spat out- and on the other hand, because of his genuine sincerity it's not safe to simply go by his confidence level. You have to question whether that confidence is misplaced.
Um... wouldn't boycotting these technologies (such as they are) make their reach that much less than if you weren't boycotting them?
Weird to be seeing hardcore Microsoft propaganda from an open source project leader. Why doesn't he just go over to Microsoft and work for them if he wants their stuff deployed that much? Why is he even bothering to be involved with free software at all? Of course, didn't he also arrange to have a free project _drop_ the LGPL and go with a more proprietary-friendly arrangement? Who is this guy?
I was a bit surprised not to see, "The PS2's DirectX support just isn't there yet- in fact, Sony have not even pledged to commit to supporting it in future! This has to be considered a major drawback, that will slow and hobble PS2 development" :D
Whoever did GT3 had an artistic sense fit for working in film EFX, not just PC gaming, and used things like blur and desaturation to produce nearly photographic results. By contrast, Gotham is clearly (no pun intended!) about showing off as many polygons as possible, so it looks downright fake. Reality is dirty and often out of focus. The developers in the Microsoft camp are evidently not encouraged to understand this (it would make it look as if not as many polygons are in use!) so their output continually looks more like high-end 1995 raytracing. You go 'my, that must be a lot of polygons' and it looks real plastic.
I think my favorite line was along the lines of 'of course, graphics quality is FAR superior to PS2'. Um, OK. Is that why Gotham Racing looks totally fake and computer-rendered and GT3 looks eerily photographic? Somebody's not using their freaking EYES. Mind you, that XBox fighting game looks very slick. Other games, like 'Shrek', look appalling- like 1999 PC games with more polygons.
I think it's quite laughable. If they want to seriously concern themselves with image quality they'd better put down the crack pipes, quit paying off hardware review sites for paid promotional materials masquerading as articles, and devote thought to current _EFX_ concepts like atmospheric effects, cinematography, haze etc. You DO NOT WIN by showing off how many polygons you have and how clear everything is. That's freaking 1995 GFX thinking. Sometimes you win by doing stuff that is actually very simple and easy, but in an artistic way...
I'm reminded of the book "Disney Animation: The Illusion Of Life" which goes into backgrounds at one point, and how the Disney animators often took pains to NOT depict the background with wizzy high fidelity and clarity... some effective backgrounds, shown in the book and used in feature films, were little more than blurs of color with bits of vague detail in them, and they worked perfectly in context.
It just furthers my opinion that Microsoft have all the artistic insight of Garth Brooks selling Dr. Pepper... and the companies that are making games for X-Box are largely being persuaded to on grounds of easiness, cheapness and (likely to be frustrated) greed. If that's the best they can do there's going to be a lot of really lame, undistinguished games out for X-Box that nobody will particularly want to play...
Come up with some prospective names and do a google _news_ search to see what people are saying about such cards in, say, rec.audio.pro. DON'T go by what you can find on the Web or on 'reviews'...