Not if they did ALL the work on it. If one entity does all the work on something then it can be multiple-licensed, or they can stop putting out GPLed versions of the latest one. If the GPL version had outside work coming in and they accepted it but did not have the outsiders sign over copyright (or become 'employees' and thus part of the same entity) then they can't do that because it'd be incorporating outside GPL code into a proprietary thing. It's gotta be all theirs for them to do this...
Not at all. If I was setting out to be as evil as MS, I wouldn't settle for pathetic manuals and the arrogance of not giving personal attention.
I'd dump just as many millions into funding a vast horde of paid propagandists with loads of audiovisual support and authority to take teachers on pilgrimages to Redmond to see how capitalism really does bring happiness and prosperity etc etc... and I'd have the propagandists at the beck and call of the teachers at the slightest whim... and I wouldn't stop at application training, I would make damned sure all the teachers also were won over to the Microsoft view of free market capitalism, not to mention security and the proper limitations on freedom of speech.
I can see Ballmer now: "teachers, teachers, teachers! teachers! Teachers! Teachers! TEACHERS..."
You've got to be crazy if you don't see the opportunities here. Microsoft's interests, in the present-day world, go WAY beyond getting people to use Office. This is just what they need and if I was them I'd be ready to spend BILLIONS in excess of what we're talking about, just to control the teachers and through them, control the fundamental truths children are taught. It's INCREDIBLY important. And you don't control teachers by bossing them about. Look at what MS does to get business- they don't go 'fall in line or else', that's for when they HAVE your business. When they're getting you to buy in, they will throw whole teams of people with elaborate, detailed presentations supporting their position, and if you look at the proposal in isolation and treat their word as honorable, you've GOT to buy in.
It will be the same when they send teams of people into schools: it's just that the message will be different.
Well, they ARE criminals. And they are guilty. And what's being proposed is essentially, punishing Microsoft for strongarming its way into complete control of various markets, by having it strongarm its way into complete control of another market. Through dumping, to boot. I mean, what?
Jamie's comments were perfectly understandable. This whole idea is ridiculous and insane. It may even happen, too, which is shameful.
"I think that the open-source phenomenon will quietly, undignifiably, dissapear soon. It is a lofty and noble goal to be sure, however as a sustainable movement, I believe it will become less important over time. Why? Because the high-flying VC money and gold-rush speculation that drove those fat boomtime salaries are what really paid for open-source."
Wow- rarely have I seen a point missed so breathtakingly:)
What on earth gives you the idea that open source was driven by capitalistic goals? Critics of OSS often call it 'communist' or perhaps 'socialist' and there's some element of truth to it, but to a large extent it is an anarchist phenomenon- key licenses such as the GPL deftly render centralised control absolutely impossible.
Open source is not an economic phenomenon in the first place. It's an information-control phenomenon- it's not driven and sustained by the direct motivation of greed and profit, it is driven by a REACTION against information control. The whole POINT is to establish a commons of software information that cannot be taken away from people, or placed under hierarchical control. Hence, the anarchist analogy.
During the 'dot-bomb hangover', things are so tight that the proprietary guys, in the best tradition of their centralized-control, creator/consumer (not to say master/slave!) system, inevitably turn to controlling their consumers, withholding more, figuring out ways to turn the screws and compel payment from people who themselves are hard pressed. The VC money isn't there anymore and it's 'make people pay' time.
This will drive more Open Source proliferation, rather than less- because OSS is not driven by people's desire for personal gain, it is driven through people's desire to escape a bind. The tighter you turn the screws on people, the MORE they will flee to open source software authoring and using- if they can.
Barring really interesting authoritarian behavior way beyond simply outlawing OSS- they can. You have it exactly backwards and are looking in the wrong places for motivation-to-use-and-code-OSS...
Re:Used to be a big fan
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Carpe Jugulum really grew on me upon rereading it- possibly because I am a Witches fan, particularly Granny Weatherwax. Guess it's in the blood;)
"Sucked big time"? Can't be having with that!
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You've got it backwards. Think about it for a second: you need X much bandwidth to send textures to the screen (for instance, this is where PS2 has a 128-bit bus, much harder to emulate), Y much bandwidth to handle sound, and Z much bandwidth to run the actual game off system memory.
Now, some of the time, you gotta copy textures from Z to X, which of course is the big win you think you're getting with UMA. But... how often are you doing this? And meanwhile- on the XBox you have to deal with XYZ all at once over the same bus. You don't get to offload video stuff onto its own memory subsystem- everything is fighting for the same RAM. That's not a win- that's a lose.
My hunch is that very likely state-of-the-art gamer PCs can ALREADY completely handle anything that's happening on XBox- the only reason you're not seeing the same games as PC games is because (a) they were never developed for general PC use and wouldn't work on a wide spectrum of PCs and 3D cards, and (b) Microsoft won't let you have them on PC, because then it would be obvious that the PC is already a superset of XBox.
And I'm a Mac dude, not given to blathering on about how wonderful PCs are- but seriously, it's the XBox that has the bottlenecks, and that is shown by frame rates as poor as a tenth or twentieth of what PC gamers are used to seeing. I'm hearing that XBox drops to 10 fps routinely in demanding games like DOA and Halo, when the scene complexity gets heavy. It's already hitting its performance limits- it's NOT like people don't know how to program for DirectX, and future years will see wonders as the programmers figure out the mysterious new machine. It's dead familiar, that's how something like DOA was possible at all. But it's also hitting absolute peak right out of the box with DOA and Halo- there will not be future games that are more impressive, unless they are impressive in an artistic sense, which is of course possible. Like if 'Thief' was done for the XBox... but of course that developer is dead.
Actually, the cruelest thing you could do to them is to observe that it's a PC with a half-decent GeForce card in it (that will soon be outclassed by PC gamer cards) and pitifully inferior video buss bandwidth further hobbled by a unified memory architecture... yawn... get a PS2 or an old Atari or, hell, the board game 'Monopoly'... and forget about them entirely.
Considering them irrelevant and technically backward hurts them FAR worse, even if it is true. And the XBox is technically backward- frame rates are poor for a console, and it's early days to be talking about reliability. Don't waste your time on the silly thing. Buy paintball equipment instead- now that's a game;)
"Let's make LIBRARIANS destroy this information for us! Hey, come to think of it, they have records of who's checked out various books, don't they? Let's make all librarians federal employees and give them powers to go to people's homes and destroy any copies of information which has been withdrawn! Who better to do it?"
Actually, I was reminded of a SF author's work as well, but it wasn't Bradbury- it was Asimov. Remember that bit in the Foundation trilogy where Hober Mallow's just learned a spy^H^H^Hmissionary has been let onto his ship? And he relieves the guy of duty immediately- and what he says about that?
"There's no merit in discipline under ideal circumstances. I'll have it in the face of death, or it's useless."
What use is freedom that only works under ideal circumstances? What good are rights that only apply if you won't use them? We ARE looking at freedom in the face of death- as we learned painfully. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people instantly conclude, "Oh- never mind!" and only gave a rat's ass for their freedom and rights so long as nobody was getting hurt. It doesn't work like that. We need to embrace our freedoms MORE in the face of death- they are all that separate us from the Taliban itself.
Yes, this is a US citizen saying this. Sorry, but I'm a stranger here myself... do you really think we are in control here?
I don't think they can guarantee the same method of interpolation is in use in all CD players. Some might interpolate between surrounding good samples, others might just hold the last good sample until the next good one comes along. You can't guarantee what sort of error correction is in use.
For that reason, the name 'Cactus Data Shield' is very appropriate: when ripped it is full of 'spikes' ruining the music, when perfectly interpolated it may possibly be sample-for-sample identical (assuming the substituted samples are ONLY those where surrounding samples interpolated will return the exact, precise amount- I'm not at all sure this is a safe assumption), but when imperfectly interpolated the _best_ output still has traces of the 'cactus spines'- like stubs:)
On a CD player with inferior interpolation it is probably slightly more sonic degradation than you get from DVD-A watermarking because watermarking is bandlimited to avoid the more sensitive areas of hearing, and this 'residual cactus spikes' effect will reach into the highs and spit out artifacts on steep wave slopes.
I know that in debugging azumith-correction algorithms I could hear high-frequency artifacts of just one sample duration when they were of this nature- a departure from the even slope of a waveform. I would respectfully suggest that the dangers of inadequate error correction are more severe and audible than the CDS guys are ready to admit, and that on many CD players traces of high frequency crackling and grunge will still be audible even after 'interpolation'...
As an indie music maven and audio tool coder I have to say I am just tickled by all this. How nice of the music industry cartel to ruin the quality of their products FOR me, thus making it easier for people in basements and dorm rooms to produce music that's actually better than the cartel makes. A few more years of that and they'll have done serious damage to the former popular opinion that industry music is more professional than unsigned music:)
The trouble is when expert programmers aren't expert users- or when implementing user stuff isn't as much fun as implementing programmers stuff.
I've been bitten by this myself (still am, to an extent- I suspect that's inevitable). I develop mastering software for the Mac, which is GPLed. I don't have any help with it, that's not why I'm GPLing, but I do have connections with some serious mastering engineers who occasionally have time to look at it or talk about it socially. One of my motivations from early on was to give it a more text-based interface in many places so that I could get more resolution and control range out of important parameters, and so I had three gain trim controls: left, right, and a further trim to adjust both. All were in 'ratio' form- '2' meant twice the amplitude, '1.2' meant 1.2X the amplitude, and so on. This was a convenience for implementing the normalize function and further gain adjustments.
It took many, many versions until I did the obvious and labeled the controls in decibels- because that was a very important USER fix, but it wasn't any fun as a programmer fix. It didn't make the output act any differently, or do anything exciting or fun- all it was, was a process of putting the parameter through two transforms into and out of the twitchy logarithmic measure known as decibels.
However, finally buckling down and doing it meant that the program inhabited the land of 'users' of mastering software more, and the land of 'developers' less. It seems to me you have to have some of both- lean too far towards the land of users and you start developing interfaces with buttons that are photorealistic and throb while the guts of the code goes nowhere, and lean too far towards the land of developers and the interface is a batch file read in reverse hungarian notation;)
But it is useful to remain aware that while you are a better programmer than the user, the user may well be a better user of your tool than you are- and may have very urgent priorities that you don't understand. And if you totally ignore this- you're just wanking:)
My rule is that I comment code to say what I _think_ I'm doing. Then if I got it wrong, later I can look at the comment and go 'what?' and be on the alert for implications:)
Um- going out and taking business from a cartel with Mob ties is _usually_ considered a difficult job:)
I'm not making that up, it's common knowledge among people who are interested in both music and business. You might do a little research- you could start with Frederic Dannen's book "Hit Men". It'd be a good idea to have some idea of what you're talking about otherwise you just look silly:)
"The problem is that this desert environment leaves much of the promise of the Web untapped. Without business models that work, there is no way for the Web to reach anything near its full potential. Here is one very simple example. Go to any bookstore today and you can find hundreds of thousands of titles available, all of them published on paper."
...because God forbid you should be able to go to a LIBRARY. That would be wrong!
I hate people like this... they can make private theories all they want but when they start to get in the way of the common good I object. To me the full potential of the web is the way almost anybody who can write rudimentary HTML tags in an editor and afford dialup can put out a web page for the world to see. It doesn't scale so the whole world literally isn't going to be seeing it, but so what?
I'm glad there's a lot of other people who won't put up with this nonsense, because I consider it a very hostile, sociopathic thing- to define all of life only in terms of its business model and whether it turns a profit. I realise there are people who think like that- but keep their hands off the controls please!
Yes yes- like when Marc Andressen saw an early early version of Internet Explorer, and went, "Whoa! We'd better make an open source version of this and call it Mosaic before IE takes over the market unopposed!";)
Suffice to say I question what innovation takes place at all in the proprietary sector? Seems to me a lot of that gets cherry picked out of academia. Academia doesn't _have_ to use open source- but it certainly can.
And Joe Sixpack certainly cannot hack online bill payment programs in C++... but I would definitely say that for Joe, the power relationships he gets into for his personal finances are THE most important thing, taking precedence over cost and feature count. Proprietary software can be substantially restrictive, phenomenally so with UCITA, and the impact of this is not only real, but it is on a level higher than just weighing features and cost. As such, "what kind of power relationships am I consenting to?" IS the foremost question people need to be asking.
Do you want product activation and 'selfhelp' on your video game console? Fine. Do you want it on the computer you keep your accounts on, or pay bills with? Do you want product activation and selfhelp on your kidney machine or the software running the airplane you're flying to LA on? There is _always_ a point at which you have to jump out of the 'cost/benefit' framework and look at risk analysis. You're simply maintaining that for the class labeled 'consumer' there's no such point- that they do not need to pay any mind to power relationships they get into. That's bad...
No, it can't take down much of the open source movement: it would be more like a massive backup failure. The people would still be out there, the code would still be out there, but the central point would be disrupted and people would have to come up with their own web hosting for their own projects. It's not at all a given that a single central point is the heart of open source: I might suggest that sourceforge tanking would mean little to the open source movement because the actual work would continue getting done by those who do it.
Of those of you who have open source projects up on the net, how many of you _don't_ have a local copy as backup?
What we have seen in the poor financial performance of many Open Source companies is an indication that the exchange mechanism is still not good enough to reward behavior that is good for the commons, assuming we agree that OSS is good on its own right. It is merely a reflection on the fact that Nash equilibrium is generally not global optimum, unless the exchange mechanism is fine tuned in a very clever way."
Bingo!
The OSS behavior is completely effective for enabling people to throw off power relationships that they don't want. Being forced to rent software, to re-purchase newer versions, is virtually impossible under open source. It establishes a commons that is _available_ and typically cost-free. It's hard to argue that can be anything BUT good for the commons: more rather than less commons is by definition good for the commons.
What we see in the poor financial performance of OSS companies is an indication that our marketplace, our exchange mechanism, penalizes behavior that rewards the commons. Our marketplace rewards hoarding and abuses of power, because that's the way we've got it set up right now.
Does this mean we ought to give up on a commons, on open source, and just fight it out in the marketplace we have? Of course not! All it means is that our marketplace isn't good enough AS a marketplace to bring abundance. It, instead, brings scarcity and sporadic pockets of abundance in hoarded stuff.
At the same time, it's not bad enough as a marketplace to completely bring scarcity- if you want real scarcity, repeal all laws, disband government, and turn all media over to big business, and you'll see real scarcity: after a series of megamergers, you'll be down to one kind of corn flakes in 2000 different brightly colored boxes, and the media will tell you the world is perfect and Soylent Green is made from organic corn grown by happy local farmers. In the absence of rules and controls, truth is a liability. We're not at that point- just moving in that direction, with the control mechanisms for our market and media being dismantled.
In the market for computer software, the GPL _is_ one of those control mechanisms. Use of it doesn't benefit the user optimally, but it benefits the user to some extent while benefitting the commons to some extent.
So, it may look like communism a bit- but try thinking of it as one of the checks and balances on capitalism. If you have an engine and it has a governor, the governor doesn't help the engine go faster, or produce power- it actually eats up some power and efficiency- but it's part of the engine and helps the engine run over a wider, less-controlled range of conditions without disaster.
IBM doesn't need to make money on open source. Ever. What they get out of it is the ability to not be dependent on, and paying a tithe to, anybody else for software development. It's not a method for them of driving income. It's a method of cutting costs and avoiding power relationships that aren't to their interest- they can avoid dependency on proprietary software vendors by spending the money they'd otherwise be spending on that, on open source.
At no point do they ever have, or need, to sell it. That's not their business...
It's true that ESR puts things in an economic framework, and as such the question being asked first is "does this make economic sense?", but Free software doesn't come primarily from economics-based origins. It comes from control-based origins, and is more about power relationships than it is about money relationships.
As such, it's perfectly valid and reasonable to say "this open source stuff isn't allowing me to compete in this capitalistic market!" The context would be something like SourceForge, since for industries less about software authoring, the "open source stuff" can still be a way to cut costs and own outright the means of data processing instead of renting it (say, from Microsoft.)
However, the problem comes when people don't even think to ask any of the other questions: foremost, I think, would be
Is this capitalistic market itself imposing power relationships on me that aren't to my interest?
THAT is the relevant question. Look at the big picture... look at the types of power relationships that exist among vendors, users, developers... it may be that Open Source never does make a sensible business model, but in a world where 'sensible business models' amount to serious power inequities between players and a Darwinian reduction of industries to only the most aggressive, restrictive players, is a business model really the thing to want? If that is the game (and with Microsoft being found repeatedly totally guilty of power abuses and wrist-slapped cautiously, I suggest it is), is it even proper to consider only how best to play that one particular game?
Microsoft knows what it's dealing with when it makes Open Source and the GPL in particular, public enemy number one. These are not effective economic weapons- they are effective specifically at breaking the hold a restrictive vendor exerts on its victims/developers/customers. If you can have ownership of your own software you can't be armtwisted- you are immune from power abuses.
This is in a context of business, again, and power abusers have the most effective business model IF most people are subject to their power. People using open source or developing it may never, ever have comparable economic power or competitive business models- but they can wield a 'spoiler' effect, allowing others to bail out of the proprietary sphere if it's getting too restrictive for them. This is what threatens Microsoft, not some notion that Red Hat will end up with a billion dollar war chest.
And it is right for this sort of thing to frighten power abusers- because it is in fact antithetical to their primary business model. If they were just selling service and quality and working hard it'd be another story- but the winning strategy has been to twist power relationships for all they're worth, and that is precisely what is threatened.
How does all this apply to VA and SourceForge?
Well- they have a choice, though it may be already made for them. They can go the one way- keeping open, and losing in the marketplace but enabling a wide spectrum of 'spoiler' projects that keep proprietary software in check. Otherwise each project will have to maintain its own web presence at its own expense, as I do (Mastering Tools). Or, they can roll the other direction, increasingly twisting power relationships to compete in the marketplace on the marketplace's own terms (even if those are set by hardcore libertarian ideology and best illustrated by Microsoft). If they do that, though, Free software itself is a threat to them, because it destabilises power relationships and makes it possible to avoid lock-in.
It sounds like they're doing the latter. Pity- I guess they felt they had to grow grow grow, to compete in the marketplace and maintain stock valuation. Unfortunately, for them to take this approach is antithetical to free software itself, so I would say they are fucked.
If you can install transmitters into all defense attorneys, can we also install concealed explosive charges? That way, if the person is found to be an attorney, they can be safely detonated:)
Well, I voted for him. And I'd do so again, look at the way he isn't just taking his marbles and going home, but still trying to make a difference. Nader is awesome. I hope I can get another chance to vote for him. Not only Microsoft can benefit from stubborn, dogged persistence!
Quick slashdot poll: how many of you believe that if Nader had got elected, the Justice Department would have responded to winning every case including an en banc session of the Court of Appeals by letting the defendant go without even fining them?
This is a beautiful, horrible example of everything Nader was talking about in his campaigning. He was RIGHT. He still is.
Sweet! I totally missed that. What a kick in the teeth to the 'we need to punish them but not so's they'll object' mentality. It doesn't even matter if this approach bears fruit or if it's just bureaucratic and useless: if it's what Microsoft will absolutely hate, hell yes, do that! I hope the Judge reads this bit with special interest. Talk about an effective deterrent:)
Um- one of the links this very article includes addresses Microsoft's plan for stamping out error disclosure. The Register has also reported on this recently. The other half of Microsoft's plan is to rely on silently updating Windows computers with security patches. Microsoft also bundles unrelated stuff with security patches, megabytes worth of it.
So the problems that Microsoft patches cause are not solely due to 'oh, Microsoft software is so much more sophisticated and advanced!' but due to bad planning and inappropriate bundling combined with lack of disclosure of what's being altered. And it is going to get MUCH worse, not better. To cap it off, if they are able to suppress disclosure of bugs and security holes, they don't need to regression test anywhere near as hard as you seem to think they are doing- because all that will happen is that Windows boxes will mysteriously die and there won't be any publically disclosed link to connect that with Microsoft updates.
Hell, if they can truly cut off all disclosure, they can just STOP any work on security patches entirely. Who'd know?
Sorry dude: Macs have bundled IE for _years_. You can't not purchase Microsoft products indirectly by getting a Mac!
Do the best you can under the circumstances. I use Macs, and I make a point of throwing out IE and using iCab or netscape or something- and I also go into the system folder, and throw out the large amount of operating system code (to support IE) such as ActiveX support and a host of OS extensions Microsoft insist upon building into Macintoshes.
Interestingly, this seems to make the Mac more stable. But the bottom line is you cannot either avoid indirectly purchasing Microsoft products- or even running MS OS code! by using stock Macs. They come with extensive Microsoft code and you have to literally go in and take that garbage out if you want to run a non-Microsoft MacOS.
How's that strike you? Does that make you more or less persuaded that Microsoft is dangerous and all-controlling? Maybe your original vow is all the more worthwhile seeing as you CAN'T do it without either going incredibly DIY to the point of building your own computer and running nothing but Linux, or abandoning computers entirely.
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ianal, I've just been over this topic a lot...
I'd dump just as many millions into funding a vast horde of paid propagandists with loads of audiovisual support and authority to take teachers on pilgrimages to Redmond to see how capitalism really does bring happiness and prosperity etc etc... and I'd have the propagandists at the beck and call of the teachers at the slightest whim... and I wouldn't stop at application training, I would make damned sure all the teachers also were won over to the Microsoft view of free market capitalism, not to mention security and the proper limitations on freedom of speech.
I can see Ballmer now: "teachers, teachers, teachers! teachers! Teachers! Teachers! TEACHERS..."
You've got to be crazy if you don't see the opportunities here. Microsoft's interests, in the present-day world, go WAY beyond getting people to use Office. This is just what they need and if I was them I'd be ready to spend BILLIONS in excess of what we're talking about, just to control the teachers and through them, control the fundamental truths children are taught. It's INCREDIBLY important. And you don't control teachers by bossing them about. Look at what MS does to get business- they don't go 'fall in line or else', that's for when they HAVE your business. When they're getting you to buy in, they will throw whole teams of people with elaborate, detailed presentations supporting their position, and if you look at the proposal in isolation and treat their word as honorable, you've GOT to buy in.
It will be the same when they send teams of people into schools: it's just that the message will be different.
Jamie's comments were perfectly understandable. This whole idea is ridiculous and insane. It may even happen, too, which is shameful.
Wow- rarely have I seen a point missed so breathtakingly :)
What on earth gives you the idea that open source was driven by capitalistic goals? Critics of OSS often call it 'communist' or perhaps 'socialist' and there's some element of truth to it, but to a large extent it is an anarchist phenomenon- key licenses such as the GPL deftly render centralised control absolutely impossible.
Open source is not an economic phenomenon in the first place. It's an information-control phenomenon- it's not driven and sustained by the direct motivation of greed and profit, it is driven by a REACTION against information control. The whole POINT is to establish a commons of software information that cannot be taken away from people, or placed under hierarchical control. Hence, the anarchist analogy.
During the 'dot-bomb hangover', things are so tight that the proprietary guys, in the best tradition of their centralized-control, creator/consumer (not to say master/slave!) system, inevitably turn to controlling their consumers, withholding more, figuring out ways to turn the screws and compel payment from people who themselves are hard pressed. The VC money isn't there anymore and it's 'make people pay' time.
This will drive more Open Source proliferation, rather than less- because OSS is not driven by people's desire for personal gain, it is driven through people's desire to escape a bind. The tighter you turn the screws on people, the MORE they will flee to open source software authoring and using- if they can.
Barring really interesting authoritarian behavior way beyond simply outlawing OSS- they can. You have it exactly backwards and are looking in the wrong places for motivation-to-use-and-code-OSS...
"Sucked big time"? Can't be having with that!
Now, some of the time, you gotta copy textures from Z to X, which of course is the big win you think you're getting with UMA. But... how often are you doing this? And meanwhile- on the XBox you have to deal with XYZ all at once over the same bus. You don't get to offload video stuff onto its own memory subsystem- everything is fighting for the same RAM. That's not a win- that's a lose.
My hunch is that very likely state-of-the-art gamer PCs can ALREADY completely handle anything that's happening on XBox- the only reason you're not seeing the same games as PC games is because (a) they were never developed for general PC use and wouldn't work on a wide spectrum of PCs and 3D cards, and (b) Microsoft won't let you have them on PC, because then it would be obvious that the PC is already a superset of XBox.
And I'm a Mac dude, not given to blathering on about how wonderful PCs are- but seriously, it's the XBox that has the bottlenecks, and that is shown by frame rates as poor as a tenth or twentieth of what PC gamers are used to seeing. I'm hearing that XBox drops to 10 fps routinely in demanding games like DOA and Halo, when the scene complexity gets heavy. It's already hitting its performance limits- it's NOT like people don't know how to program for DirectX, and future years will see wonders as the programmers figure out the mysterious new machine. It's dead familiar, that's how something like DOA was possible at all. But it's also hitting absolute peak right out of the box with DOA and Halo- there will not be future games that are more impressive, unless they are impressive in an artistic sense, which is of course possible. Like if 'Thief' was done for the XBox... but of course that developer is dead.
In both Halo and that Gotham Racing game, the reports I read said that framerates dropped to around 10 fps at some points.
Considering them irrelevant and technically backward hurts them FAR worse, even if it is true. And the XBox is technically backward- frame rates are poor for a console, and it's early days to be talking about reliability. Don't waste your time on the silly thing. Buy paintball equipment instead- now that's a game ;)
"Let's make LIBRARIANS destroy this information for us! Hey, come to think of it, they have records of who's checked out various books, don't they? Let's make all librarians federal employees and give them powers to go to people's homes and destroy any copies of information which has been withdrawn! Who better to do it?"
Actually, I was reminded of a SF author's work as well, but it wasn't Bradbury- it was Asimov. Remember that bit in the Foundation trilogy where Hober Mallow's just learned a spy^H^H^Hmissionary has been let onto his ship? And he relieves the guy of duty immediately- and what he says about that?
"There's no merit in discipline under ideal circumstances. I'll have it in the face of death, or it's useless."
What use is freedom that only works under ideal circumstances? What good are rights that only apply if you won't use them? We ARE looking at freedom in the face of death- as we learned painfully. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people instantly conclude, "Oh- never mind!" and only gave a rat's ass for their freedom and rights so long as nobody was getting hurt. It doesn't work like that. We need to embrace our freedoms MORE in the face of death- they are all that separate us from the Taliban itself.
Yes, this is a US citizen saying this. Sorry, but I'm a stranger here myself... do you really think we are in control here?
For that reason, the name 'Cactus Data Shield' is very appropriate: when ripped it is full of 'spikes' ruining the music, when perfectly interpolated it may possibly be sample-for-sample identical (assuming the substituted samples are ONLY those where surrounding samples interpolated will return the exact, precise amount- I'm not at all sure this is a safe assumption), but when imperfectly interpolated the _best_ output still has traces of the 'cactus spines'- like stubs :)
On a CD player with inferior interpolation it is probably slightly more sonic degradation than you get from DVD-A watermarking because watermarking is bandlimited to avoid the more sensitive areas of hearing, and this 'residual cactus spikes' effect will reach into the highs and spit out artifacts on steep wave slopes.
I know that in debugging azumith-correction algorithms I could hear high-frequency artifacts of just one sample duration when they were of this nature- a departure from the even slope of a waveform. I would respectfully suggest that the dangers of inadequate error correction are more severe and audible than the CDS guys are ready to admit, and that on many CD players traces of high frequency crackling and grunge will still be audible even after 'interpolation'...
As an indie music maven and audio tool coder I have to say I am just tickled by all this. How nice of the music industry cartel to ruin the quality of their products FOR me, thus making it easier for people in basements and dorm rooms to produce music that's actually better than the cartel makes. A few more years of that and they'll have done serious damage to the former popular opinion that industry music is more professional than unsigned music :)
I've been bitten by this myself (still am, to an extent- I suspect that's inevitable). I develop mastering software for the Mac, which is GPLed. I don't have any help with it, that's not why I'm GPLing, but I do have connections with some serious mastering engineers who occasionally have time to look at it or talk about it socially. One of my motivations from early on was to give it a more text-based interface in many places so that I could get more resolution and control range out of important parameters, and so I had three gain trim controls: left, right, and a further trim to adjust both. All were in 'ratio' form- '2' meant twice the amplitude, '1.2' meant 1.2X the amplitude, and so on. This was a convenience for implementing the normalize function and further gain adjustments.
It took many, many versions until I did the obvious and labeled the controls in decibels- because that was a very important USER fix, but it wasn't any fun as a programmer fix. It didn't make the output act any differently, or do anything exciting or fun- all it was, was a process of putting the parameter through two transforms into and out of the twitchy logarithmic measure known as decibels.
However, finally buckling down and doing it meant that the program inhabited the land of 'users' of mastering software more, and the land of 'developers' less. It seems to me you have to have some of both- lean too far towards the land of users and you start developing interfaces with buttons that are photorealistic and throb while the guts of the code goes nowhere, and lean too far towards the land of developers and the interface is a batch file read in reverse hungarian notation ;)
But it is useful to remain aware that while you are a better programmer than the user, the user may well be a better user of your tool than you are- and may have very urgent priorities that you don't understand. And if you totally ignore this- you're just wanking :)
My rule is that I comment code to say what I _think_ I'm doing. Then if I got it wrong, later I can look at the comment and go 'what?' and be on the alert for implications :)
I'm not making that up, it's common knowledge among people who are interested in both music and business. You might do a little research- you could start with Frederic Dannen's book "Hit Men". It'd be a good idea to have some idea of what you're talking about otherwise you just look silly :)
I hate people like this... they can make private theories all they want but when they start to get in the way of the common good I object. To me the full potential of the web is the way almost anybody who can write rudimentary HTML tags in an editor and afford dialup can put out a web page for the world to see. It doesn't scale so the whole world literally isn't going to be seeing it, but so what?
I'm glad there's a lot of other people who won't put up with this nonsense, because I consider it a very hostile, sociopathic thing- to define all of life only in terms of its business model and whether it turns a profit. I realise there are people who think like that- but keep their hands off the controls please!
Suffice to say I question what innovation takes place at all in the proprietary sector? Seems to me a lot of that gets cherry picked out of academia. Academia doesn't _have_ to use open source- but it certainly can.
And Joe Sixpack certainly cannot hack online bill payment programs in C++... but I would definitely say that for Joe, the power relationships he gets into for his personal finances are THE most important thing, taking precedence over cost and feature count. Proprietary software can be substantially restrictive, phenomenally so with UCITA, and the impact of this is not only real, but it is on a level higher than just weighing features and cost. As such, "what kind of power relationships am I consenting to?" IS the foremost question people need to be asking.
Do you want product activation and 'selfhelp' on your video game console? Fine. Do you want it on the computer you keep your accounts on, or pay bills with? Do you want product activation and selfhelp on your kidney machine or the software running the airplane you're flying to LA on? There is _always_ a point at which you have to jump out of the 'cost/benefit' framework and look at risk analysis. You're simply maintaining that for the class labeled 'consumer' there's no such point- that they do not need to pay any mind to power relationships they get into. That's bad...
Of those of you who have open source projects up on the net, how many of you _don't_ have a local copy as backup?
Bingo!
The OSS behavior is completely effective for enabling people to throw off power relationships that they don't want. Being forced to rent software, to re-purchase newer versions, is virtually impossible under open source. It establishes a commons that is _available_ and typically cost-free. It's hard to argue that can be anything BUT good for the commons: more rather than less commons is by definition good for the commons.
What we see in the poor financial performance of OSS companies is an indication that our marketplace, our exchange mechanism, penalizes behavior that rewards the commons. Our marketplace rewards hoarding and abuses of power, because that's the way we've got it set up right now.
Does this mean we ought to give up on a commons, on open source, and just fight it out in the marketplace we have? Of course not! All it means is that our marketplace isn't good enough AS a marketplace to bring abundance. It, instead, brings scarcity and sporadic pockets of abundance in hoarded stuff.
At the same time, it's not bad enough as a marketplace to completely bring scarcity- if you want real scarcity, repeal all laws, disband government, and turn all media over to big business, and you'll see real scarcity: after a series of megamergers, you'll be down to one kind of corn flakes in 2000 different brightly colored boxes, and the media will tell you the world is perfect and Soylent Green is made from organic corn grown by happy local farmers. In the absence of rules and controls, truth is a liability. We're not at that point- just moving in that direction, with the control mechanisms for our market and media being dismantled.
In the market for computer software, the GPL _is_ one of those control mechanisms. Use of it doesn't benefit the user optimally, but it benefits the user to some extent while benefitting the commons to some extent.
So, it may look like communism a bit- but try thinking of it as one of the checks and balances on capitalism. If you have an engine and it has a governor, the governor doesn't help the engine go faster, or produce power- it actually eats up some power and efficiency- but it's part of the engine and helps the engine run over a wider, less-controlled range of conditions without disaster.
GPL does the same thing.
At no point do they ever have, or need, to sell it. That's not their business...
As such, it's perfectly valid and reasonable to say "this open source stuff isn't allowing me to compete in this capitalistic market!" The context would be something like SourceForge, since for industries less about software authoring, the "open source stuff" can still be a way to cut costs and own outright the means of data processing instead of renting it (say, from Microsoft.)
However, the problem comes when people don't even think to ask any of the other questions: foremost, I think, would be
Is this capitalistic market itself imposing power relationships on me that aren't to my interest?
THAT is the relevant question. Look at the big picture... look at the types of power relationships that exist among vendors, users, developers... it may be that Open Source never does make a sensible business model, but in a world where 'sensible business models' amount to serious power inequities between players and a Darwinian reduction of industries to only the most aggressive, restrictive players, is a business model really the thing to want? If that is the game (and with Microsoft being found repeatedly totally guilty of power abuses and wrist-slapped cautiously, I suggest it is), is it even proper to consider only how best to play that one particular game?
Microsoft knows what it's dealing with when it makes Open Source and the GPL in particular, public enemy number one. These are not effective economic weapons- they are effective specifically at breaking the hold a restrictive vendor exerts on its victims/developers/customers. If you can have ownership of your own software you can't be armtwisted- you are immune from power abuses.
This is in a context of business, again, and power abusers have the most effective business model IF most people are subject to their power. People using open source or developing it may never, ever have comparable economic power or competitive business models- but they can wield a 'spoiler' effect, allowing others to bail out of the proprietary sphere if it's getting too restrictive for them. This is what threatens Microsoft, not some notion that Red Hat will end up with a billion dollar war chest.
And it is right for this sort of thing to frighten power abusers- because it is in fact antithetical to their primary business model. If they were just selling service and quality and working hard it'd be another story- but the winning strategy has been to twist power relationships for all they're worth, and that is precisely what is threatened.
How does all this apply to VA and SourceForge?
Well- they have a choice, though it may be already made for them. They can go the one way- keeping open, and losing in the marketplace but enabling a wide spectrum of 'spoiler' projects that keep proprietary software in check. Otherwise each project will have to maintain its own web presence at its own expense, as I do (Mastering Tools). Or, they can roll the other direction, increasingly twisting power relationships to compete in the marketplace on the marketplace's own terms (even if those are set by hardcore libertarian ideology and best illustrated by Microsoft). If they do that, though, Free software itself is a threat to them, because it destabilises power relationships and makes it possible to avoid lock-in.
It sounds like they're doing the latter. Pity- I guess they felt they had to grow grow grow, to compete in the marketplace and maintain stock valuation. Unfortunately, for them to take this approach is antithetical to free software itself, so I would say they are fucked.
If you can install transmitters into all defense attorneys, can we also install concealed explosive charges? That way, if the person is found to be an attorney, they can be safely detonated :)
If they can do that, can't they just make up whatever the hell they want and claim it went into effect yesterday? Creepy.
Quick slashdot poll: how many of you believe that if Nader had got elected, the Justice Department would have responded to winning every case including an en banc session of the Court of Appeals by letting the defendant go without even fining them?
This is a beautiful, horrible example of everything Nader was talking about in his campaigning. He was RIGHT. He still is.
Sweet! I totally missed that. What a kick in the teeth to the 'we need to punish them but not so's they'll object' mentality. It doesn't even matter if this approach bears fruit or if it's just bureaucratic and useless: if it's what Microsoft will absolutely hate, hell yes, do that! I hope the Judge reads this bit with special interest. Talk about an effective deterrent :)
So the problems that Microsoft patches cause are not solely due to 'oh, Microsoft software is so much more sophisticated and advanced!' but due to bad planning and inappropriate bundling combined with lack of disclosure of what's being altered. And it is going to get MUCH worse, not better. To cap it off, if they are able to suppress disclosure of bugs and security holes, they don't need to regression test anywhere near as hard as you seem to think they are doing- because all that will happen is that Windows boxes will mysteriously die and there won't be any publically disclosed link to connect that with Microsoft updates.
Hell, if they can truly cut off all disclosure, they can just STOP any work on security patches entirely. Who'd know?
Do the best you can under the circumstances. I use Macs, and I make a point of throwing out IE and using iCab or netscape or something- and I also go into the system folder, and throw out the large amount of operating system code (to support IE) such as ActiveX support and a host of OS extensions Microsoft insist upon building into Macintoshes.
Interestingly, this seems to make the Mac more stable. But the bottom line is you cannot either avoid indirectly purchasing Microsoft products- or even running MS OS code! by using stock Macs. They come with extensive Microsoft code and you have to literally go in and take that garbage out if you want to run a non-Microsoft MacOS.
How's that strike you? Does that make you more or less persuaded that Microsoft is dangerous and all-controlling? Maybe your original vow is all the more worthwhile seeing as you CAN'T do it without either going incredibly DIY to the point of building your own computer and running nothing but Linux, or abandoning computers entirely.
Did you know it was that bad?