I have never seen such an erroneous spelling of 'Wozniak'. My my.
You're thinking Applesoft basic for the ][+, not Woz's original Integer basic for the ][... which was open source, with all the code publically available. If I'm not mistaken the entire source in assembly was listed in the first manuals?
If everyone was taught the 'pravda' that Gates invented BASIC and wrote the first Basic for Apple etc. ad nauseam, would it be true?
Not yet. If Philips can get the debate featured on 60 minutes or some news TV show, that could change overnight. They are in a singularly good PR position in that they plainly want the publicity whatever the outcome- and JUST GETTING the publicity will help their case. There isn't a lot of room for spin here. The only thing the RIAA side can do is outright silence Philips so nobody ever hears about them, particularly mainstream media. Any slashdotters with contacts in big media (JON KATZ ARE YOU LISTENING?) need to start suggesting that the Philips position is worth a news story. We need the guts of this story to be shown on TV so joe and jane Wal-Mart are made aware of it, and given a dim sense of ripped-offness. Basic element is quite simply, is it a 'real' CD you're buying, or one made not to work? That's perfect for TV news.
Now, let the RIAA sue Philips to _legally_ render the CD trademark useless. Publically. And let them explain WHY.
There's a reason the RIAA are trying to do some of these things as quietly as possible. They are not going to challenge the CD trademark. Can't you see the dumbed down media coverage on that? How would you phrase it? "In media today, the RIAA is suing Philips over the CD trademark! Lawyers are bringing suit to be allowed to use the CD trademark on CDs that won't play in your computer. Philips, who owns the trademark, says no- they want things with the CD trademark to play anywhere, including in your computer..."
How else could you phrase that? The only way to even express the conflict is over 'what you're allowed to do with CDs', which people may well take for granted. Wouldn't you like to see that debate on the evening news? Let it come across the radar of middle America and see if they feel they're being ripped off.
Even the _response_ can be dumbed down and still be relevant. Picture 1,000,000 people going into the Wal-Mart entertainment section with new CDs and asking the cash register person, "Hey, is this really a CD? You know? Or is it, like, not really a CD and it's a fake that won't work on my computer like CDs are sposed to? I saw it on TV." It doesn't take a lot of shrewdness to feel ripped off or be suspicious.
Do they walk into a language store to buy a couple liters of French to talk to their neighbor?
...could be a good experiment for the 'software is communication' concept. See if they can find what they need just by having the computers 'talk' to other computers openly. Run down to the 'Freshmeat' store for a jug of Galeon:)
Perhaps people have seen many many "Let's think rationally. Windows is probably the best choice here" opinions expressed, over the years.
Not to mention polls showing that.NET is way more popular than Java!;)
I say you're right. Go for it! Maybe not the iMacs- Apple can take care of itself thank you. If they're gonna do this, do it with Linux and see if you can't plant seeds for some good open research and experimentation like we used to have back in the day. Monoculture of ten thousand windowing environments;) eventually it'll become very diverse indeed. And the whole time, everything about the experiment can be audited by anyone interested in knowing.
""[The GNU goal was] to be able to use a computer without using any proprietary software," declaims RMS. [cnn.com] "Because that way, you can lead a better life." Of course, the only way to get rid of proprietary software is to destroy the software companies that produce it."
Funny, I'd have thought the goal would be achieved by supplying free methods and techniques for doing all things the proprietary software does. I don't see anyone, even RMS, looking to directly destroy the companies that produce proprietary software, except Microsoft, and they don't count as they are criminals and deserve to be destroyed for other reasons, like fraud, blackmail and extortion. Instead I see the goal being that people should only pay for proprietary software if they WANT to, for instance if it is particularly nicely GUIed or runs 70% faster or has teams of repairman ready to come help you or something. Why should people be compelled to resort to proprietary stuff JUST because it is proprietary stuff? Maybe some people aren't fond of the idea of having a free basic level of competition which a proprietary vendor must exceed if they expect to sell to customers?
"One way this is accomplished is by putting software that would normally be public domain under a license RMS himself created, called the "General Public License," or "GPL." Simply put, this license allows code to be reused-- unless the final product is distributed without its source code, as a proprietary product must be."
Funny how that works- curiously enough, all software would normally be public domain except that some people choose to claim rights to such earthshaking concepts as 'clicking a picture of a button on a screen, once' and refusing to let people use those ideas and that code. In fact, call me paranoid but it might be that some organisation like that will, some day, get crazy and antisocial enough to try and PATENT the idea of clicking a button on a screen once to do a thing, so people can't even use an idea LIKE the one the proprietary guy has claimed rights to. Thank God THAT will never happen!;P
As to the GPL vs. public domain: what gives you the idea that proprietary concepts and public domain can coexist? Do you see them coexisting in practice? Since proprietary guys can take concepts from the public domain and patent them and bodily remove them from the public domain, isn't it true that RMS, in inventing the GPL, simply implemented a protected public domain, which by design can't be cherrypicked at all unless you agree to work within the public domain that you are cherrypicking?
Wouldn't the counterpart be a desire to be allowed to cherrypick proprietary software, take the ideas and start publically using them without fear of reprisal? Is that not completely antithetical to the whole point of proprietary software?...then, why do you consider cherrypicking public domain for the benefit of proprietary stuff to be any more sensible? It rather defeats the purpose, wouldn't you say? Particularly with what you may call retroactive patenting.
I look forward to reading what you have to say when you grow up and have read other books besides Atlas Shrugged:)
Well, _I_ don't have a house or a dot-com resume. Go pound sand. Go find more honest work. You're asking whether you should help this guy spam the crap out of me so you can eat more sumptuous meals in this house of yours? Go somewhere else where the cost of living isn't stupid high.
I respect your wanting to pay the bills, but that respect only goes so far. Don't update this clown's spamming machinery. Please.
Because the people doing that and wasting immeasurable resources in doing it, are forced to pay for the materials, pay for the printing, pay for schlepping trailerfuls of circulars around, and finally pay the government large sums for the privilege of stuffing it into the postal system. All up front. They gotta shell out the cash for each little circular.
If you had to pay a nickel for each email you sent out, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much spam. It's up to you if you consider spam to be harmless, but you do pay for it, and apparently you kill a lot of time looking it over;)
Why on earth would the net be free for all things? First of all, it's not free for ANYTHING- somebody's picking up the tab. Secondly, what gives you the idea that totally unrestricted interaction is an ideal? When you talk to someone in real life, do you expect to be able to punch them in the nose, or take scissors and cut off all their hair? No, you do not. You are expected to observe socially acceptable restrictions.
I think a much more sensible goal would be, 'try to maximize the freeness of the net for most things'. Someone could hook up a giant spam machine to the backbone of the net and DOS everybody in the world. Is that 'freedom' or is that just wiping out the resources of other people for selfish reasons? You simply cannot expect all things to have a natural balance that arises as an epiphenomenon out of normal activity. Many things have no such balance and WILL go completely out of control unless checked. Spam is one of those things, just like telemarketing. The natural way of things is for greedy bastards and con artists to TAKE all your time and attention just so long as they have a mechanism for doing so. Spam programs, telemarketing war-dialers, are those mechanisms. There is no way to stop this natural but completely negative result other than setting and enforcing rules.
Re:Genetically modified food has existed for ages
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Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
The big to-do is who is doing the genetic engineering, what could be the result (just about anything- poison is 'naturally produced' too. Bitter almonds, anyone?), and how the hell would we know about it when the company doing it is ready to pollute streams so badly that fish explode when put in it, for decades, and focus entirely on cover-up the whole time, and still not have a clue that there is a problem with that course of action?
I think the scare tactics as you call it are well justified. Prove genetically modified foods _aren't_ time bombs. Maybe they're as harmless as peanuts- only we're all allergic.:P Evidence suggests that Monsanto will shove 'em down our throats anyhow, and when we are half dead they will begin planning a legal avoidance strategy and in the words of the memo, 'keep on selling them as fast as we can'.
If it was some academic institution maybe it'd be less alarming, but these guys are proven to poison, and proven to lie and cover up for decades no matter how bad the truth is. They are not qualified to produce genetically engineered food for human consumption. They're about as qualified as Hannibal Lecter is to be a butcher. Gee, they're surprisingly competent, BUT...
Microsoft is very different- they don't conceal much. All we'll find out is that lots more 'linux isn't ready', 'boy, OSX's interface bites' articles and opinions were fabricated by MS than anybody knew at the time. If they were really doing that much more, OSS coders would be turning up dead or something. We do already know what they do. It's not much of a secret.
Re:Think Monsanto are bad? Check out Union Carbide
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Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
I think we now have another name to put beside Bhopal now. It frankly stuns me to read about. I know Union Carbide were so careless that they allowed a major, horrible poison gas disaster to happen through negligence- at the same time, here is Monsanto, intentionally polluting streams so bad that fish fucking explode when put in the water- for decades? I would not have believed it was possible for water to be so polluted that fish fucking fall apart when put in it. I'd have thought that even if you put a fish in battery acid it takes a while to dissolve... and Monsanto knew the whole time, it was not about 'something bad might happen', it was a continuing dumping of mass quantities of poison into the town's water and ground. What the hell gives?
Lynching begins to look like the only really fitting response... how can you let people like that live? They are too dangerous to society.
Re:Libertarian Politics Fails Here
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Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
Get your gun, or shut up.
Until you start personally hunting these people down as you claim you'd do, I will assume you'll simply pocket a small bribe and ignore the problem. Convince me otherwise, or shut up. Seems to me your kind of thinking caused this. That's my opinion, so show why I am wrong- demonstrate how libertarians will place defense of human beings (or simply themselves?) against the opportunity to personally profit from a more generally bad situation. I think you'd move your kids across down, get paid off, and button your lip... more or less collaborating with them.
They have before and they will again. You just must not be a Mac-head from way back. I've been using Macs for many years and paying attention to the ol' platform wars, and I can tell you that Microsoft have done just this sort of thing against MacOS. That's probably how they got it so that Macs ship with IE standard, depend on Office terribly, and by default run a LOT of operating system code from Microsoft. I'm not certain that is the case for OSX- I do know that being loaded up with MS extensions is SOP for all previous MacOSes since around System 8.5, if not before. That's as shipped from the factory, not counting MS product installs that install OS extensions. Also, I understand that Office for OSX installs a daemon.
Yeah, God forbid anybody receiving that email or an Exchange auto-forwarding of that email would not be utterly supportive of Microsoft, or that Microsoft should ever have security problems that could lead to leaks of information.
Anyone want to lay bets that the cover letter to the Register read, "I send you this file in order to have your advice"?:D
Legislation is only codified application of pressure. Frankly, in this case the only alternative I can see is... well, I doubt I have to describe it but I will. Periodically, my phone begins ringing, and if I answer it, it hangs up. Eventually one of these times, I get a telemarketer and tell 'em 'take my name off this list!' in no uncertain manner. I've learned this situation can be attributed to phone-dialing networks that call thousands of people and only hand over a smaller number of live phone-answerers to an operator- except that there aren't enough operators, hence the mechanism devolves to ringing me up randomly to hang up on me.
Without the legislation compelling these people to have a do not call list, without a system of rules to control their behavior, it becomes like email spam only live- and, as I've sometimes calculated for download and deletion of email spam, X% of my life is wasted responding to a telephone inquiry by a machine that hangs up on me. That X% is not a fixed number. There are a lot of people in the world dumb enough to think they can use shotgun methods to get business, and X% can be arbitrarily large, just as it can with email spam.
You cannot expect to hand people what is effectively a weapon and not expect them to use it. Whether it is spam or telemarketing, the concept is always 'we can force X number of people to interact with our annoyance mechanism if Y% of them end up buying from us'. The cost of this is the concern: if people could only bug you door-to-door, that puts a cap on how many of them any given marketer can employ. If they only have to use a phone, that expands their range of attack. If they only have to monitor a war-dialer in hopes it will weed out answering-machines and disconnected numbers, their range of attack expands still further. If they need only run a program to spam the Western World with 100 messages in everyone's mailbox- etc etc.
It is technology that sets up this situation, and in the absence of legislation it is an arms race that cannot be won. You can have your resources rendered USELESS by the actions of nothing more than marketers at a high enough intensity. I've put my phone on no-ring machine-only with the speaker volume all the way down, at times when I was being really hammered by telemarketwardialers. That's an attack on a resource that I pay for and 'own', just like it was a DOS on my webpage.
THAT is why we have legislation, and why we need the legislation to deal with this particular stuff. It's not even about 'privacy' for everybody, so much as it is about having our resources assaulted by machines, spam and similar technological innovations that can attack us more effectively than we can chase them off.
THAT is why we need legislation, foobar.
Re:Double Blind Listening Tests... Where ???
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Ogg Vorbis RC3 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, such tests are more a test of the listener's ability to not get ear fatigue than anything else. That said, this guy has PC software to do this with, plus a lot of files to compare, including one (a test of 'articulation') that uses lossy-encoded files vs. an uncompressed version. He also has a link to a Mac version now, because I coded it for him.
When I did that, I also tried some of his tests to see what kind of listener I was. I can barely hear background noise at all, but was able to pick out the original from 256K mp3 encoding 11 out of 14 times, which is proof to ABXers. This was Arny's 'articulation' test at 'probably impossible' level... I am a mastering engineer who writes DSP software and I was using my studio reference system. He tells me there was one other person once who was able to ace that test, and he's considering toning down the language and not calling it 'impossible' anymore if people can get it 11 out of 14 and so on- but to most people it is impossible. Again, that's 256K mp3, and not Xing either.
I'm sure I could tell Ogg Vorbis too, but you have to know what to listen for when the bit rate gets luxurious. There was no real tonal change to listen for, it's just that the 256K file was recognizably characterless, sort of like 'pod people' of audio. Hardly surprising as this is just what I work to avoid in full-resolution CD audio- that too can be rather bland and characterless if you're not careful!
(My own audio work is at www.airwindows.com/dithering/, GPLed, recently added some mid/side stereo features and a GUI Knob class that worked out quite well)
Well... nobody who drives a steamroller through a kitten factory gets MY business!:o
Apart from that, hear hear. Know what I care about? I care that my software is open. Photoshop is not 'my' software, I just bought some and use it. I do not have the power to make people like that share their work, even if doing so would help me and help society in general. I just have power over what I do, particularly over what I code up myself.
I'm mac based, so quite a lot of software I use and enjoy is freeware. Of this, very little is truly open source- the most significant OSS to me that I use is Mastering Tools, which was written BY me. That's not so wrong.
3 cheers for X-Plane mars planes
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Flying on Mars
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· Score: 2
On top of the copy-control stuff, we also have this small parenthetical note (that was news to me): "The CactusPJ player features difficult-to-see buttons and needs a second window to show track info. It also shows up as possible spyware on Ad-aware 5.6."
Why am I somehow not surprised at this? Anyone got information on what it sends and where, if it does turn out to be spyware? If I was the kind of fool to write software like this I'd probably have it look for mp3s on the assumption that all mp3s are by definition contraband. If I was more of a fool I'd have the program delete them or something. Has anyone studied the behavior of this apparently annoying and awkward program?
Define 'death'? I pay for a web hosting service off my ISP- rotten disk space allowance, but no cap on bandwidth and good reliability. Are we talking about an assumption that one must produce REVENUE from web 'properties'? That seems deeply questionable to me- it's like saying the purpose of advertising is to charge people to watch them. What?
Your point about content dying as it gains popularity is a good one- the cost of providing huge bandwidth can price a site out of people's range. This doesn't consider options like permitting mirroring, or simply acknowledging that some people won't be able to get access to the content. You'll note that usenet, which you mentioned, is all mirroring and propagating. So is P2P.
The reason the Web has a particular value is because it's a 'property', a fixed location with lots of software that's been out there for years that knows how to go look up 'www.foobaz.com' if you ask. The fact that this is usually (not invariably!) the same server in the same physical location, is not an advantage, it's just the LABEL that is the advantage, hence all the battling over trademarks etc.
If commercial interests manage to genuinely stomp out all personal interests on the WWW, then maybe you can call that death. I have a bit of a hard time seeing fan Trek sites and the like as genuinely personal interests... a lot of the stuff that's being stepped on is, to some ways of thinking, genuinely the property of somebody else. Yes, 1000 trek fan sites is an amazing thing, yes having Paramount step on them is a shame, but if I am a science fiction writer who is NOT Star Trek, maybe I am not as full of sympathy. I might see people thronging to pay attention to the usual corporate malarkey and putting up lots of sites at their own expense and writing fanfic based on that stuff- supposing it's good- is it really such a great thing that people waste their energies getting all excited over corporate rubbish rather than creating their own artworks based on their own ideas? I guess that's debatable.
There are some possible benefits to having the corporations really tighten the screws on powerless individuals. In some of those cases, the powerless individuals happen to be expending energy in celebrating the productions of the corporation. Trek, Harry Potter, etc. Is it so wrong if the corporations' true colors show, and they undercut their own cultural proliferation?
For everybody else- well, hopefully you will always be able to buy _some_ space on the Web and _some_ kind of label/domain-name to direct people to. Hopefully it won't descend to where you can't even put two English words together in a new way without it being judged too similar to some company's words. All this is not new- it's just being fought over again on the new turf.
I'm currently doing something similar- the program I maintain is Mastering Tools, which has long been an over-featured, densely packed program operating on a text input basis with a certain amount of visual feedback on the text input.
However, I've long known that there are two things my real users (ideal users? the serious mastering engineers) want: familiar interface and realtime processing. I can't deliver realtime processing without literally doing the whole thing over again in a language I don't know (it's done in REALbasic, which is little better than a scripting language for speed, though it's got really, really nice prototyping abilities and GUI support.
However, the time's come to completely overhaul the interface, partly because I have some ideas for mid/side processing and don't have any room in the current layout to fit them! The ideas have to do with rectifying the side channel and using it to either enhance or remove signals that aren't in both channels equally- where regular mono is a 'node' that totally eliminates out-of phase content, it's also possible to completely eliminate R and L-only content and keep only R+L and also the out-of-phase content.
That part's the easy part- it's simply signal processing (and will be duly released under the GPL as soon as it's done, as always). However, the interface is asking for a total, complete overhaul in several ways, and that's what's taking all my effort currently. Here's the situation and how I'm handling it...
Layering. It's no longer possible to fit the whole app in a 640x480 area, even with small print. There are several possible answers to this: one would be having separate windows. This would be more adaptable to larger screens, but it's untidy and there are issues with closing windows and still referring to controls they contain- so that's out. What's looking more reasonable is tabbed panels- RB implements a nice little drag and droppable tabbed panel control that appears quite easy (though I had some trouble attempting to do nested tabbed panels- after one experience of having all the nested panels (at identical coordinates) switch to the top panel of their parent panel, I quickly gave up on that concept. Instead I'm using more panel real estate and trying to divide the controls into logical categories. That is, of course, a real headache- doing interface properly is hard! (says 'interface is hard Barbie') It's only somewhat easier with the additional space. Complicating matters further, is the expectation of the intended audience here. It has to both be organized and look and feel like a mixing board, amplifier or rackmount box of some sort.
Solution: implementing controls like knobs and meters. It's actually quite fun to code a knob appearance out of graphics primitives- and surprisingly hard to get mouse gestures to work on the damn thing- using a two-arg arctangent routine in RB that I don't fully understand. I also have a single meter control already implemented for azimuth display- think that it might be best to tear that apart and re-implement it in a more general sense.
That's because the Knob class turned out to be the right thing to do- it's implemented almost totally separate from the main body of the program, as if it were a RB control or something. Knowing I was going to be using it in different sizes, possibly different colors etc, I wrote the knob code as completely scalable- from maybe 20 pixels to over 100. It reads its size from the control width and height, runs itself as far as handling mouse input and storing a control value, and does not inherit comparable interfaces to the controls it will be replacing- so when it's time to plug 'em in I can run the program and see what routines crash and burn (and need to be rewritten for the new control interface). I'm thinking meters need to also be handled in the same way- somehow- not clear on the form yet.
So: dunno what else to tell you, but it seems like the things I'm doing that are helpful are: compartmentalize new interfaces, make them adaptable and get them working independently of the existing code, while leaving the existing code in working condition. Then when the new stuff is brought online do it in such a way that you could do it one control at a time or in small batches.
Dunno if that's relevant to where you're coming from- but it's what I've found necessary when facing a major re-implementation.
Interestingly, the Red Book spec includes subcodes such as the Q subcode, which can be used to store a song-specific ISRC code.
ISRC codes are increasingly necessary to get a song on the radio in ANY circumstances- some stations won't even deal with you unless you have ISRC codes. It's also possible to take the audio and the ISRC code, and produce a degenerated copy of the audio that has the ISRC codes, normally not part of the audio stream at all, watermarked into it. This is not only for 'tape off the radio' controls, but also to automate royalty calculations- it's being pioneered in Japan, who are well ahead of the curve on this. Europe has followed and the USA will follow, and you won't be able to deal with radio at all without ISRC codes.
Here's the interesting part: ISRC codes are an ISO standard, not some record industry ploy. In the USA, the RIAA administers them- and you have to go through the RIAA to get an ISRC identification for your record label- but they do not charge for this, or demand an affiliation with an RIAA label.
I know, because I have an ISRC code for 'Airwindows' records. It is 'WA5'. I gave my home address on the form, and under 'distribution' I put 'Ampcast'. The guy at the RIAA I talked to, Marquette Mathis, was quite friendly. He wondered what 'Ampcast' was, and I explained it was an online burn-to-order hosting service that was able to handle true Red Book audio, hence my need for an ISRC code. He wondered if I knew how to use an ISRC code, and I replied "yeah, it's the Q subcode" which instantly told him I knew what it was. Now I just have to produce some CD masters in Jam (which I'm getting for Xmas!) and keep a good record (on paper, not just computer) of exactly which codes went to which individual songs- and if I can ever get my music 'on the air' in this new world of automated RIAA royalty payment, I will have tapped into THEIR mechanisms for royalties- and I'm the contact person for Airwindows.
There's life for indies and the underground in the old Red Book Audio CD format yet...
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking Applesoft basic for the ][+, not Woz's original Integer basic for the ][... which was open source, with all the code publically available. If I'm not mistaken the entire source in assembly was listed in the first manuals?
If everyone was taught the 'pravda' that Gates invented BASIC and wrote the first Basic for Apple etc. ad nauseam, would it be true?
Not yet. If Philips can get the debate featured on 60 minutes or some news TV show, that could change overnight. They are in a singularly good PR position in that they plainly want the publicity whatever the outcome- and JUST GETTING the publicity will help their case. There isn't a lot of room for spin here. The only thing the RIAA side can do is outright silence Philips so nobody ever hears about them, particularly mainstream media. Any slashdotters with contacts in big media (JON KATZ ARE YOU LISTENING?) need to start suggesting that the Philips position is worth a news story. We need the guts of this story to be shown on TV so joe and jane Wal-Mart are made aware of it, and given a dim sense of ripped-offness. Basic element is quite simply, is it a 'real' CD you're buying, or one made not to work? That's perfect for TV news.
Now, let the RIAA sue Philips to _legally_ render the CD trademark useless. Publically. And let them explain WHY.
There's a reason the RIAA are trying to do some of these things as quietly as possible. They are not going to challenge the CD trademark. Can't you see the dumbed down media coverage on that? How would you phrase it? "In media today, the RIAA is suing Philips over the CD trademark! Lawyers are bringing suit to be allowed to use the CD trademark on CDs that won't play in your computer. Philips, who owns the trademark, says no- they want things with the CD trademark to play anywhere, including in your computer..."
How else could you phrase that? The only way to even express the conflict is over 'what you're allowed to do with CDs', which people may well take for granted. Wouldn't you like to see that debate on the evening news? Let it come across the radar of middle America and see if they feel they're being ripped off.
Even the _response_ can be dumbed down and still be relevant. Picture 1,000,000 people going into the Wal-Mart entertainment section with new CDs and asking the cash register person, "Hey, is this really a CD? You know? Or is it, like, not really a CD and it's a fake that won't work on my computer like CDs are sposed to? I saw it on TV." It doesn't take a lot of shrewdness to feel ripped off or be suspicious.
Not to mention polls showing that .NET is way more popular than Java! ;)
I say you're right. Go for it! Maybe not the iMacs- Apple can take care of itself thank you. If they're gonna do this, do it with Linux and see if you can't plant seeds for some good open research and experimentation like we used to have back in the day. Monoculture of ten thousand windowing environments ;) eventually it'll become very diverse indeed. And the whole time, everything about the experiment can be audited by anyone interested in knowing.
Funny, I'd have thought the goal would be achieved by supplying free methods and techniques for doing all things the proprietary software does. I don't see anyone, even RMS, looking to directly destroy the companies that produce proprietary software, except Microsoft, and they don't count as they are criminals and deserve to be destroyed for other reasons, like fraud, blackmail and extortion. Instead I see the goal being that people should only pay for proprietary software if they WANT to, for instance if it is particularly nicely GUIed or runs 70% faster or has teams of repairman ready to come help you or something. Why should people be compelled to resort to proprietary stuff JUST because it is proprietary stuff? Maybe some people aren't fond of the idea of having a free basic level of competition which a proprietary vendor must exceed if they expect to sell to customers?
"One way this is accomplished is by putting software that would normally be public domain under a license RMS himself created, called the "General Public License," or "GPL." Simply put, this license allows code to be reused-- unless the final product is distributed without its source code, as a proprietary product must be."
Funny how that works- curiously enough, all software would normally be public domain except that some people choose to claim rights to such earthshaking concepts as 'clicking a picture of a button on a screen, once' and refusing to let people use those ideas and that code. In fact, call me paranoid but it might be that some organisation like that will, some day, get crazy and antisocial enough to try and PATENT the idea of clicking a button on a screen once to do a thing, so people can't even use an idea LIKE the one the proprietary guy has claimed rights to. Thank God THAT will never happen! ;P
As to the GPL vs. public domain: what gives you the idea that proprietary concepts and public domain can coexist? Do you see them coexisting in practice? Since proprietary guys can take concepts from the public domain and patent them and bodily remove them from the public domain, isn't it true that RMS, in inventing the GPL, simply implemented a protected public domain, which by design can't be cherrypicked at all unless you agree to work within the public domain that you are cherrypicking?
Wouldn't the counterpart be a desire to be allowed to cherrypick proprietary software, take the ideas and start publically using them without fear of reprisal? Is that not completely antithetical to the whole point of proprietary software? ...then, why do you consider cherrypicking public domain for the benefit of proprietary stuff to be any more sensible? It rather defeats the purpose, wouldn't you say? Particularly with what you may call retroactive patenting.
I look forward to reading what you have to say when you grow up and have read other books besides Atlas Shrugged :)
I respect your wanting to pay the bills, but that respect only goes so far. Don't update this clown's spamming machinery. Please.
Either that, or the politicians will be too happy and too busy with their hands to cause more trouble :D
If you had to pay a nickel for each email you sent out, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much spam. It's up to you if you consider spam to be harmless, but you do pay for it, and apparently you kill a lot of time looking it over ;)
I think a much more sensible goal would be, 'try to maximize the freeness of the net for most things'. Someone could hook up a giant spam machine to the backbone of the net and DOS everybody in the world. Is that 'freedom' or is that just wiping out the resources of other people for selfish reasons? You simply cannot expect all things to have a natural balance that arises as an epiphenomenon out of normal activity. Many things have no such balance and WILL go completely out of control unless checked. Spam is one of those things, just like telemarketing. The natural way of things is for greedy bastards and con artists to TAKE all your time and attention just so long as they have a mechanism for doing so. Spam programs, telemarketing war-dialers, are those mechanisms. There is no way to stop this natural but completely negative result other than setting and enforcing rules.
I think the scare tactics as you call it are well justified. Prove genetically modified foods _aren't_ time bombs. Maybe they're as harmless as peanuts- only we're all allergic. :P Evidence suggests that Monsanto will shove 'em down our throats anyhow, and when we are half dead they will begin planning a legal avoidance strategy and in the words of the memo, 'keep on selling them as fast as we can'.
If it was some academic institution maybe it'd be less alarming, but these guys are proven to poison, and proven to lie and cover up for decades no matter how bad the truth is. They are not qualified to produce genetically engineered food for human consumption. They're about as qualified as Hannibal Lecter is to be a butcher. Gee, they're surprisingly competent, BUT...
Microsoft is very different- they don't conceal much. All we'll find out is that lots more 'linux isn't ready', 'boy, OSX's interface bites' articles and opinions were fabricated by MS than anybody knew at the time. If they were really doing that much more, OSS coders would be turning up dead or something. We do already know what they do. It's not much of a secret.
Lynching begins to look like the only really fitting response... how can you let people like that live? They are too dangerous to society.
Until you start personally hunting these people down as you claim you'd do, I will assume you'll simply pocket a small bribe and ignore the problem. Convince me otherwise, or shut up. Seems to me your kind of thinking caused this. That's my opinion, so show why I am wrong- demonstrate how libertarians will place defense of human beings (or simply themselves?) against the opportunity to personally profit from a more generally bad situation. I think you'd move your kids across down, get paid off, and button your lip... more or less collaborating with them.
They have before and they will again. You just must not be a Mac-head from way back. I've been using Macs for many years and paying attention to the ol' platform wars, and I can tell you that Microsoft have done just this sort of thing against MacOS. That's probably how they got it so that Macs ship with IE standard, depend on Office terribly, and by default run a LOT of operating system code from Microsoft. I'm not certain that is the case for OSX- I do know that being loaded up with MS extensions is SOP for all previous MacOSes since around System 8.5, if not before. That's as shipped from the factory, not counting MS product installs that install OS extensions. Also, I understand that Office for OSX installs a daemon.
Anyone want to lay bets that the cover letter to the Register read, "I send you this file in order to have your advice"? :D
Without the legislation compelling these people to have a do not call list, without a system of rules to control their behavior, it becomes like email spam only live- and, as I've sometimes calculated for download and deletion of email spam, X% of my life is wasted responding to a telephone inquiry by a machine that hangs up on me. That X% is not a fixed number. There are a lot of people in the world dumb enough to think they can use shotgun methods to get business, and X% can be arbitrarily large, just as it can with email spam.
You cannot expect to hand people what is effectively a weapon and not expect them to use it. Whether it is spam or telemarketing, the concept is always 'we can force X number of people to interact with our annoyance mechanism if Y% of them end up buying from us'. The cost of this is the concern: if people could only bug you door-to-door, that puts a cap on how many of them any given marketer can employ. If they only have to use a phone, that expands their range of attack. If they only have to monitor a war-dialer in hopes it will weed out answering-machines and disconnected numbers, their range of attack expands still further. If they need only run a program to spam the Western World with 100 messages in everyone's mailbox- etc etc.
It is technology that sets up this situation, and in the absence of legislation it is an arms race that cannot be won. You can have your resources rendered USELESS by the actions of nothing more than marketers at a high enough intensity. I've put my phone on no-ring machine-only with the speaker volume all the way down, at times when I was being really hammered by telemarketwardialers. That's an attack on a resource that I pay for and 'own', just like it was a DOS on my webpage.
THAT is why we have legislation, and why we need the legislation to deal with this particular stuff. It's not even about 'privacy' for everybody, so much as it is about having our resources assaulted by machines, spam and similar technological innovations that can attack us more effectively than we can chase them off.
THAT is why we need legislation, foobar.
When I did that, I also tried some of his tests to see what kind of listener I was. I can barely hear background noise at all, but was able to pick out the original from 256K mp3 encoding 11 out of 14 times, which is proof to ABXers. This was Arny's 'articulation' test at 'probably impossible' level... I am a mastering engineer who writes DSP software and I was using my studio reference system. He tells me there was one other person once who was able to ace that test, and he's considering toning down the language and not calling it 'impossible' anymore if people can get it 11 out of 14 and so on- but to most people it is impossible. Again, that's 256K mp3, and not Xing either.
I'm sure I could tell Ogg Vorbis too, but you have to know what to listen for when the bit rate gets luxurious. There was no real tonal change to listen for, it's just that the 256K file was recognizably characterless, sort of like 'pod people' of audio. Hardly surprising as this is just what I work to avoid in full-resolution CD audio- that too can be rather bland and characterless if you're not careful!
(My own audio work is at www.airwindows.com/dithering/, GPLed, recently added some mid/side stereo features and a GUI Knob class that worked out quite well)
A very good soundbite, that. "If it's illegal why am I paying taxes on it?"
Apart from that, hear hear. Know what I care about? I care that my software is open. Photoshop is not 'my' software, I just bought some and use it. I do not have the power to make people like that share their work, even if doing so would help me and help society in general. I just have power over what I do, particularly over what I code up myself.
I'm mac based, so quite a lot of software I use and enjoy is freeware. Of this, very little is truly open source- the most significant OSS to me that I use is Mastering Tools, which was written BY me. That's not so wrong.
I'm of the 'with gravity that low, make a sailplane-like craft' school ;)
Why am I somehow not surprised at this? Anyone got information on what it sends and where, if it does turn out to be spyware? If I was the kind of fool to write software like this I'd probably have it look for mp3s on the assumption that all mp3s are by definition contraband. If I was more of a fool I'd have the program delete them or something. Has anyone studied the behavior of this apparently annoying and awkward program?
Your point about content dying as it gains popularity is a good one- the cost of providing huge bandwidth can price a site out of people's range. This doesn't consider options like permitting mirroring, or simply acknowledging that some people won't be able to get access to the content. You'll note that usenet, which you mentioned, is all mirroring and propagating. So is P2P.
The reason the Web has a particular value is because it's a 'property', a fixed location with lots of software that's been out there for years that knows how to go look up 'www.foobaz.com' if you ask. The fact that this is usually (not invariably!) the same server in the same physical location, is not an advantage, it's just the LABEL that is the advantage, hence all the battling over trademarks etc.
If commercial interests manage to genuinely stomp out all personal interests on the WWW, then maybe you can call that death. I have a bit of a hard time seeing fan Trek sites and the like as genuinely personal interests... a lot of the stuff that's being stepped on is, to some ways of thinking, genuinely the property of somebody else. Yes, 1000 trek fan sites is an amazing thing, yes having Paramount step on them is a shame, but if I am a science fiction writer who is NOT Star Trek, maybe I am not as full of sympathy. I might see people thronging to pay attention to the usual corporate malarkey and putting up lots of sites at their own expense and writing fanfic based on that stuff- supposing it's good- is it really such a great thing that people waste their energies getting all excited over corporate rubbish rather than creating their own artworks based on their own ideas? I guess that's debatable.
There are some possible benefits to having the corporations really tighten the screws on powerless individuals. In some of those cases, the powerless individuals happen to be expending energy in celebrating the productions of the corporation. Trek, Harry Potter, etc. Is it so wrong if the corporations' true colors show, and they undercut their own cultural proliferation?
For everybody else- well, hopefully you will always be able to buy _some_ space on the Web and _some_ kind of label/domain-name to direct people to. Hopefully it won't descend to where you can't even put two English words together in a new way without it being judged too similar to some company's words. All this is not new- it's just being fought over again on the new turf.
I'm currently doing something similar- the program I maintain is Mastering Tools, which has long been an over-featured, densely packed program operating on a text input basis with a certain amount of visual feedback on the text input.
However, I've long known that there are two things my real users (ideal users? the serious mastering engineers) want: familiar interface and realtime processing. I can't deliver realtime processing without literally doing the whole thing over again in a language I don't know (it's done in REALbasic, which is little better than a scripting language for speed, though it's got really, really nice prototyping abilities and GUI support.
However, the time's come to completely overhaul the interface, partly because I have some ideas for mid/side processing and don't have any room in the current layout to fit them! The ideas have to do with rectifying the side channel and using it to either enhance or remove signals that aren't in both channels equally- where regular mono is a 'node' that totally eliminates out-of phase content, it's also possible to completely eliminate R and L-only content and keep only R+L and also the out-of-phase content.
That part's the easy part- it's simply signal processing (and will be duly released under the GPL as soon as it's done, as always). However, the interface is asking for a total, complete overhaul in several ways, and that's what's taking all my effort currently. Here's the situation and how I'm handling it...
Layering. It's no longer possible to fit the whole app in a 640x480 area, even with small print. There are several possible answers to this: one would be having separate windows. This would be more adaptable to larger screens, but it's untidy and there are issues with closing windows and still referring to controls they contain- so that's out. What's looking more reasonable is tabbed panels- RB implements a nice little drag and droppable tabbed panel control that appears quite easy (though I had some trouble attempting to do nested tabbed panels- after one experience of having all the nested panels (at identical coordinates) switch to the top panel of their parent panel, I quickly gave up on that concept. Instead I'm using more panel real estate and trying to divide the controls into logical categories. That is, of course, a real headache- doing interface properly is hard! (says 'interface is hard Barbie') It's only somewhat easier with the additional space. Complicating matters further, is the expectation of the intended audience here. It has to both be organized and look and feel like a mixing board, amplifier or rackmount box of some sort.
Solution: implementing controls like knobs and meters. It's actually quite fun to code a knob appearance out of graphics primitives- and surprisingly hard to get mouse gestures to work on the damn thing- using a two-arg arctangent routine in RB that I don't fully understand. I also have a single meter control already implemented for azimuth display- think that it might be best to tear that apart and re-implement it in a more general sense.
That's because the Knob class turned out to be the right thing to do- it's implemented almost totally separate from the main body of the program, as if it were a RB control or something. Knowing I was going to be using it in different sizes, possibly different colors etc, I wrote the knob code as completely scalable- from maybe 20 pixels to over 100. It reads its size from the control width and height, runs itself as far as handling mouse input and storing a control value, and does not inherit comparable interfaces to the controls it will be replacing- so when it's time to plug 'em in I can run the program and see what routines crash and burn (and need to be rewritten for the new control interface). I'm thinking meters need to also be handled in the same way- somehow- not clear on the form yet.
So: dunno what else to tell you, but it seems like the things I'm doing that are helpful are: compartmentalize new interfaces, make them adaptable and get them working independently of the existing code, while leaving the existing code in working condition. Then when the new stuff is brought online do it in such a way that you could do it one control at a time or in small batches.
Dunno if that's relevant to where you're coming from- but it's what I've found necessary when facing a major re-implementation.
Interestingly, the Red Book spec includes subcodes such as the Q subcode, which can be used to store a song-specific ISRC code.
ISRC codes are increasingly necessary to get a song on the radio in ANY circumstances- some stations won't even deal with you unless you have ISRC codes. It's also possible to take the audio and the ISRC code, and produce a degenerated copy of the audio that has the ISRC codes, normally not part of the audio stream at all, watermarked into it. This is not only for 'tape off the radio' controls, but also to automate royalty calculations- it's being pioneered in Japan, who are well ahead of the curve on this. Europe has followed and the USA will follow, and you won't be able to deal with radio at all without ISRC codes.
Here's the interesting part: ISRC codes are an ISO standard, not some record industry ploy. In the USA, the RIAA administers them- and you have to go through the RIAA to get an ISRC identification for your record label- but they do not charge for this, or demand an affiliation with an RIAA label.
I know, because I have an ISRC code for 'Airwindows' records. It is 'WA5'. I gave my home address on the form, and under 'distribution' I put 'Ampcast'. The guy at the RIAA I talked to, Marquette Mathis, was quite friendly. He wondered what 'Ampcast' was, and I explained it was an online burn-to-order hosting service that was able to handle true Red Book audio, hence my need for an ISRC code. He wondered if I knew how to use an ISRC code, and I replied "yeah, it's the Q subcode" which instantly told him I knew what it was. Now I just have to produce some CD masters in Jam (which I'm getting for Xmas!) and keep a good record (on paper, not just computer) of exactly which codes went to which individual songs- and if I can ever get my music 'on the air' in this new world of automated RIAA royalty payment, I will have tapped into THEIR mechanisms for royalties- and I'm the contact person for Airwindows.
There's life for indies and the underground in the old Red Book Audio CD format yet...