I'd say bringing high-end wordlength reduction, bandlimited sidechain compression, harmonic enhancement, and azimuth chasing into the GPL sphere is a kind of innovative:D
"Everything innovative in the music world has been crushed by lawsuits"
This is exactly what the RIAA would _like_ you to believe, because it equates to
"Everything innovative in the music world comes out of the RIAA labels"
I know it was fun downloading music from all across an RIAA-controlled recent history, but can we get a clue and start looking towards the future please?
If I wasn't working _so_ hard at, literally, innovative things in the music world (that happen to be involved with digital mastering and dynamics processing, plus wordlength reduction), I would be insulted at this pronouncement.
As it is, it just makes ya look lazy;)
Face it, there are loads of innovative, interesting things you can do with music that the RIAA has no jurisdiction over whatsoever. This includes online distribution- see ampcast.com, with their capacity to sell full Red Book audio CDs (not necessarily off mp3s- they can be original masters too) SANS JEWEL CASES to people who would want to store them in carrying cases or want to avoid jewel cases for other reasons. When was the last time you were offered the latest RIAA album at a special price for just the CD of it, no packaging?
This is only true for truncated 16 bit recordings, or crap that's been digitally altered so often on a low-resolution mix bus that it has no linearity left anymore.
If you get serious with dither and error-feedback noise shaping, you can get whatever quality you like, including a characteristic very reminiscent of SACD, all from 16 bit audio CD.
Most CDs out there DON'T have acceptable dithering and the new ones that do, are usually crap in other ways!
This is not Linux software: it is Mac software written in an easier language than C. But it IS GPLed, and that's not an accident.
CD doesn't have to mean rotten quality, and this is an analog freak saying this. CD just has _historically_ meant crap quality, just as chrysalis describes. What's being described is truncation and bad word length maintenance, particularly if it involves cheap-ass DAWs or digital mixers.
You don't have to do that- though you're not likely to see anything but that from the major labels. They've been using cheaper and cheaper equipment for years, the latest trend is for everything to be all Pro Tools, and the poor mastering engineers are stuck trying to get a musical result out of that...
Yeah, but you see I don't care much about the giving-software-away/integrating part. Maybe I write GPLed software myself and give it away for free- maybe I see software as something that will eventually become so easy to produce that it tends to become as valueless as speech: in other words, that it would be insane to charge for it but it could still be very influential if it expresses something striking and useful.
Right now it's as if people are patenting English words on the grounds that most people are illiterate and can't write... this is unclearness on the concept.
Besides, Microsoft's practices of dumping software products and bolting stuff to the OS, even if it will eventually become meaningless in an expanding 'free software' world, did AT THE TIME illustrate just the same pattern that the armtwisting of OEMs illustrated. Even if proprietary software is destined to become a historical curiosity (i.e. 'even if the future is like an RMS wet dream), at the time of the behavior, proprietary software was thought to be a market, and Microsoft's INTENT was not to deprecate the role of proprietary software, but to use their monopoly power to seize the market. The fact that their software highlights the failings of proprietary software (see the recent MSN Messenger outage! And they mean to use this stuff for.NET?) is not their intent, and you can't take that as an excuse to let them off. Just because they're digging their own grave doesn't mean you throw up your hands and let them off the hook. (*g* wonder how many more metaphors I can inflict on them in a single sentence?)
Microsoft is winning? Judge Jackson, against all expectations, handed them their ass. The appeals court, against all expectations, upheld Jackson's Findings Of Fact _and_ the guilty verdict for criminal monopoly maintenance. Microsoft is _guilty_. They did not get away. They _lost_. Now it's just a matter of finding a suitable punishment/remedy- and once again it's nothing but 'oh, but of course they're not going to do anything, they'll just let Microsoft go because money and power are more important than justice'. This, after how many times it's been shown to be self-defeating nonsense and untrue?
Microsoft is going to be _thwacked_ in some sort of way. Dunno just how, but count how many times 'everyone said' they were going to be let off, and then got totally screwed. It's not over. Suppose they get caught for threatening the New Mexico AG? "Do what we say, 'Patsy', and nobody gets hurt".
Microsoft are going to be _hosed_ with due process of law. Call that 'winning'? Cos I don't.
The article has a positively Jon Katzian glibness and is basically nothing more than a troll, for driving up page hits and sparking debate among slashdotters. This is fine for Jon Katz articles themselves (and part of Slashdot's charm), but look again! Isn't this the same site that was recently reported on as ZDNet's lame attempt to muscle sites like Anandtech out of their own market? Isn't it the very same site that was firmly identified as fake corporate grassroots? Why, goodness me, it is! And isn't this a site that would benefit from a slashdotting (build 'traffic' for PR purposes) and to become a recognizable name among techie geeks? I say it's at least 50/50 this article is a plant.
Now, they can't very well plant references in sites like Anand, because those people are too aware of the situation. But it looks like even without producing any sort of serious content, they can throw together some glib rabblerousing, get someone to plant it in Slashdot (again, 50/50 it was a plant vs. a real user) and move towards achieving their aims by building, or more accurately manufacturing, 'street cred'.
It's only a suggestion, but Slashdot story editors may wish to keep an eye out for Slash being used in this manner, and be slower to accept 'stories' that come from 'ExtremeTech'. That's just a suggestion. Personally, I would rather read Jon Katz: at least he's one of our own.
Yeah, you gotta watch those Libertarians or they'll turn around and impose government regulations forbidding you to build computers at home out of parts;)
"Whether we like it or not, M$ is the standard. The vast majority of the public uses M$ products. Period. End of story."
I must strongly and completely disagree with the last three words. Don't even say 'end of story': it's utterly historically incorrect, misleading, conclusionary and just plain wrong.
I think micropayments would be terrific. In a situation where I:
wrote a thoughtful post for Slashdot
typed it up in nice 'look Ma I can program the web' HTML
took the time to proofread the text and fix typos and grammatical errors
etc
...well, I'll have _earned_ my 0.000001 cent. Pay me that 0.000001 cent!;)
Seriously, much of the thinking on this subject is already obsolete. People are talking about the Web like it's TV. It's not- the key parts of the Web are where people interact with each other, getting involved. There are a lot of places where it would make sense to pay the participants, not charge them.
Then there's the next level: I personally have run two articles on Slashdot. Anyone can. You just have to do the work. Even without loading your to-be-slashdotted target pages with banner ads, exposure of that sort is valuable- but it is most valuable when it is not a hollow victory, when the person's put some serious effort into what's being reported on. Now, in a context of payment, does Slashdot pay those people- or expect to be paid by those people? What if there is such demand for Slashdot publicity that 'pay for publication' becomes as prevalent as 'pay to play' in live music?
At that point you're looking at a pretty ugly situation- and to go that direction belies the amount of benefit you get just from being Slashdot. Because of the freewheeling, non-paying nature of the site, a huge amount of activity has been spawned, and Slashdot's got name recognition among linux geeks comparable to Campbell's for soup or Crest for toothpaste. This is a tangible benefit while it's in force- if you run Slashdot and interact with others while your site is thriving, you are treated differently from just a run-of-the-mill geek.
If you can't turn that into money- well, maybe money isn't your first priority. But it's the kind of situation that could _lead_ to entrepeneurial activities- and the situation has a value beyond a simple counting of the money it directly produces. Income is cash but reputation is credit...
Absolutely. Jefferson had no way of _envisioning_ a technological situation where ideas were "expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation". In his day, you still had to print up books and schlep them around and it cost money to do ALL those things, and yet he still had the vision of ideas and expressions expanding limitlessly, even though the technology of his day really didn't support it.
There is nobody who would be _more_ in favor of all forms of costless digital copying than Thomas Jefferson. It's the final, beautiful realisation of an ideal he had hundreds of years ago, and didn't have the capacity to truly bring to fruition.
Jefferson wouldn't have encouraged shoplifting, stealing of physical goods. But if you told him that it would be possible for anyone to grab a copy of every word, verbatim, of any book, without depriving the original person of their copy, and without costing significant money for labor or new materials involved with the copying? He would think that was _heaven_. And if you see things his way, it is... we owe it to Jefferson to see to it that this heaven of freely copyable data continues to be a reality, and I don't mean just napster, I mean stuff like Project Gutenberg AND napster AND search engines that can turn up all that information...
It's smart... no, more than that, wise... to be wary of stirring up blind mindless nationalism. Taking that us-versus-themness and running with it is _dangerous_. Some people have learned that and some haven't...
I'm an American, but I think that at this point, Germany in general is _wiser_ than we are on the subject. They have reason to be. The question is, do 'we' have sense enough to learn from history, or are 'we' going to be the ones repeating it this time around?
If we do, I am certainly not going to sit back and let it happen without an argument. So: no, it is NOT invariably 'OK to be proud of your country'. Not without taking responsibility for the actions of your country- and doing so may temper that pride with some wisdom and levelheadedness that are terribly valuable.
National pride can so EASILY be a problem that acknowledging this is extremely important. Ignoring it is dangerous- because the emotion, like mob mentality, _does_ come naturally to people, and horrible things can happen as a result.
Are you kidding? It's not an End User License Agreement. Anyone can _use_ GPLed stuff without a thought to the GPL. It is a _developer_ agreement, authorising not simply use, but re-hacking and redistribution. _User_ agreements don't give you the right to reprogram the damn app and start giving it out!
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That is a very interesting point. To what extent do multinational corporations resemble colonial powers maintaining commercial operations in your country? Plainly there are some cases where this is not relevant, but I've seen plenty of instances where the resemblance is striking. For instance, McDonalds in France, India etc.
Re:Mess with my SUV and I'll kill 10 deer.
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Heh. Assuming you are serious and not simply trolling, reading your reaction is the strongest argument I've seen to show the ecoterrorists have a point;)
I mean, could you ask for a clearer sign that peaceful protest is useless? If you, personally, cannot be stopped from dumping oil in the ocean etc. by government means, what's left but terrorism? And if you take it as a challenge and begin to 'wage war' dedicatedly on the other side, do you honestly expect that your arrogance and stubbornness alone entitle you to win? I would suggest that this is a dangerous course of action that you should not follow.
It's so cute to see Slashdotters pulling rank over not only district court judges but entire en banc groups of Appeals Court judges:)
If the Supreme Court upholds the findings of monopoly too, and you pull rank over them, can we just hire you as the sole judge in the US legal system? It would save a lot of money:)
"The rate of change in the computer industry makes our job very hard. In particular, we can't necessarily use conduct remedies because things change so fast that a company can act anticompetitively, reap the benefit and cease the particular action, making a conduct remedy pointless in that case- the damage would already have been done. But just breaking up such a company would throw everything into chaos, and would place us in a position of restoring competition by meddling actions, and that is a problem and beyond the scope of the court."
"So what we have this this problem: a breakup sucks and would cause more damage than it prevents, but conduct remedies are useless because Microsoft's going to continue to act faster than the courts can react. So what the hell do we do? And this is the big problem with Jackson- he correctly perceives the threat of Microsoft, but hasn't got a clue to how we're supposed to handle this without regulating the industry like a damn straitjacket."
"So: do it over, and this time we've _got_ to find something to stop Microsoft's abuses without throwing the industry into complete chaos and micromanaging it. And this is a tougher problem than Jackson was ready to admit."
The fact that they _are_ a monopoly makes it unreasonable to _demand_ that the new judge be one that's never used Microsoft products. In fact it would almost be an advantage- if the new judge is a Mac user who uses Netscape etc etc. it could be taken as bias because you're _expected_ to use the monopoly product _unless_ you are biased against it.
I'm betting it's the legal ramifications. The appeals court's just sent the antitrust suit back to another district court, with a lot of the findings of fact _intact_. How much do you want to bet that Microsoft got some kind of advance notice of this decision? I can think of several possible ways, some of which would not require the cooperation of the appeals court. Any kind of hint would do, whether that is through normal channels, inferences drawn from communications to MS lawyers, running a sniffer on communications _between_ the judges... anything. The information would not have to be publically announced, just acted on.
Given that the case is going back to a lower court, I have read one account that suggests further hearings can happen including a look into Microsoft's present actions. Personally, I think even without 'smart tags', they are still playing complete brinksmanship, but if they _also_ rolled out smart tags, it would just get ridiculous. Any lawyer would make mincemeat of them- a convicted monopolist doing an end run on all of HTML to present advertising links under its central control? Give me a _break!_ So, Microsoft is not _incredibly_ stupid, just incredibly arrogant. Even they can see that this would be a slamdunk in court, and so by some mysterious coincidence just before the appeals court ruling comes out, they back off on Smart Tags. We're not going to see the original concept for Smart Tags while the case is in court, it would be just too damaging legally to Microsoft's antitrust case. I guarantee you the lawyers said, "What are you, CRAZY? Put that away until we win this completely! Then you can have it." (Not that the MS lawyers are totally free from craziness themselves- but they can at least spot how damaging this would be to their case.)
I'd like to see what would happen if you took a printed circuit board and made a printed-circuit-board filter and passed Monet's Water Lilies through _that_. Machines of loving grace, indeed;)
Why are so many people talking about Van Gogh rather than talking about taking pictures of industrial wastelands and applying the industrial wasteland filter to woodland scenes, or their own face, or computer renderings? This is potentially a _fascinating_ tool, and I want one. But the last thing I'd use it for is imitating paint brushstrokes. I can make brushstrokes with real paint, or fake brushstrokes with Painter or something. I can't make a digital image of a guitar made out of water ripples with anything but this- at least, not so effectively.
This _is_ a great thing, but it's not an artist replacement. It's a tool. It's convergence. Your ability to use it is very much dependent on what you can imagine, such as taking a portrait and doing it all in the textures of woodgrain while keeping the colors the same, or giving everything the textures of concrete, or fur, or cloth. The fact that it's not strictly texturemapping is what makes it potentially huge in significance...
This actually touches on one of the limitations of computer art: consider if you take a 1x1 pixel at 1 bit resolution. This produces a canvas that is all white, or all black. Is that art? In a conceptual, performance-art sense yes. As representational or expressive art it sucks.
Now take a 640x480 256-color computer rendering. Is that art? The idea behind it may be, but the execution is horribly crude- it's like saying kid crayon drawings are fine art. Fine art's supposed to be _tough_, it takes years to have the craft of it together. The idea is, if you have computer rendering people doing things, what's produced by a person who's creatively brilliant _and_ has been rendering for 30 years _and_ has 27 Crays to play with? If you look at the 640x480 256-color compared with an oil painting it's unavoidable that the painting has _way_ _higher_ _resolution_ in every imaginable sense.
Once you have computer rendering people getting compulsively interested in the fractal-like details of their work, and not only producing resolutions that allow for distinctions in the thousandths-of-an-inch but CARING deeply about what's happening at that lever, then you will have gotten to the stage where rendering is a fine art. By comparison, in recent years digital audio has started to reach that stage: using different approaches to dithering, it's possible to take great interest in what's going on down at least-significant-bit level, and control the pervasive tone of the recording in a fractal sort of way.
The analogy is striking- in both cases, the original form (oil paints, analog tape) had obvious faults but also a capacity to record 'fractal' sorts of detail that people respond to. The patterns of brushstrokes, the subtleties of emotion in a horn's note... then both are 'replaced' by digital media, but the early forms of the media are completely incapable of recording that level of subtlety (ask a mastering engineer about 16 bit truncation sometime!) and it takes some progress and development before the media is up to delivering the same _type_ of satisfaction as the older, more primitive methods delivered as a matter of course.
If computer rendering is not considered a fine art, then you simply need more resolution. At the point where you can render a portrait of a person's room and have the dust on the floor produce a subliminal sense of desert sands, causing the room to 'feel' a certain way... or have the dust on the floor produce a subliminal sense of ocean waves causing the room to 'feel' another way without being obviously different... why, then you will have Fine Art. You have to have both the art and the craft together to the point where you are interested in subtleties like that, interested in the 'feel' of what you're creating. Having an idea is not enough- the work has to also have resolution enough to express a great deal about how you approached it and what your intentions were. It's possible that computer rendering, as it reaches truly fine-art levels of sophistication, will wind up speaking eloquently about _mothematics_ to the discerning, in ways that the untutored would simply not get... as if fine art appreciators of the future would go, "But the most daring element is where the texture of the piece delicately shifts from error diffusion to the hint of pattern dither in the shadows of the lady's face, as if something about her is a creation of the media" etc etc... and not in a Warhol-like hit-you-with-it way, but as if you'd use different processes intentionally, at a degree of subtlety that it would be almost impossible to even perceive it, but in the full intention of using every possible element of your process as an artistic element...
Yes, but as a customer I don't _care_ about my vendor's profitability. I would want a product that I buy to retain its usefulness, possibly something that can be maintained by a wide variety of people. GNU/Linux qualifies as I can hire anyone to maintain it and have complete access to the source and rights to get it fixed by third parties. Caldera's value-add stuff does NOT necessarily qualify, as it's proprietary so I _do_ depend on Caldera ever after, if I want to have that software maintained or fixed.
Your insistence on buying from companies with a good business plan etc. is only relevant when buying proprietary products. When buying commodity products you basically want to be satisfied of the immediate condition of the product because you can get service anywhere. It makes no business sense to treat Linux as a proprietary product- just because Caldera are demanding extra money does not mean their demand is sensible or justified.
I don't see how their unclearness on the concept qualifies as a good business plan to compete with commodity software.
At the time that was a very big deal- and it _did_ trigger an incredible explosion of consumer interest. I'd agree that Woz invented the personal computer. It was a hell of a big change from the Altair scene, which was really 'obsessive crazed hobbyist' land.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say bringing high-end wordlength reduction, bandlimited sidechain compression, harmonic enhancement, and azimuth chasing into the GPL sphere is a kind of innovative :D
http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/MasteringTools ProSource.txt
And here's the homepage: http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html
Cheers :)
This is exactly what the RIAA would _like_ you to believe, because it equates to
"Everything innovative in the music world comes out of the RIAA labels"
I know it was fun downloading music from all across an RIAA-controlled recent history, but can we get a clue and start looking towards the future please? If I wasn't working _so_ hard at, literally, innovative things in the music world (that happen to be involved with digital mastering and dynamics processing, plus wordlength reduction), I would be insulted at this pronouncement.
As it is, it just makes ya look lazy ;)
Face it, there are loads of innovative, interesting things you can do with music that the RIAA has no jurisdiction over whatsoever. This includes online distribution- see ampcast.com, with their capacity to sell full Red Book audio CDs (not necessarily off mp3s- they can be original masters too) SANS JEWEL CASES to people who would want to store them in carrying cases or want to avoid jewel cases for other reasons. When was the last time you were offered the latest RIAA album at a special price for just the CD of it, no packaging?
I'm sorry Napster is history, but yeesh- move on!
If you get serious with dither and error-feedback noise shaping, you can get whatever quality you like, including a characteristic very reminiscent of SACD, all from 16 bit audio CD.
Most CDs out there DON'T have acceptable dithering and the new ones that do, are usually crap in other ways!
I've written dithering that will literally resolve signals -156db down from CD audio, as long as they are bassy frequencies- the noise level increases with frequency like in SACD. Charts and details at http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/TechDetails.ht ml, the software itself is at http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html.
This is not Linux software: it is Mac software written in an easier language than C. But it IS GPLed, and that's not an accident.
CD doesn't have to mean rotten quality, and this is an analog freak saying this. CD just has _historically_ meant crap quality, just as chrysalis describes. What's being described is truncation and bad word length maintenance, particularly if it involves cheap-ass DAWs or digital mixers.
You don't have to do that- though you're not likely to see anything but that from the major labels. They've been using cheaper and cheaper equipment for years, the latest trend is for everything to be all Pro Tools, and the poor mastering engineers are stuck trying to get a musical result out of that...
Right now it's as if people are patenting English words on the grounds that most people are illiterate and can't write... this is unclearness on the concept.
Besides, Microsoft's practices of dumping software products and bolting stuff to the OS, even if it will eventually become meaningless in an expanding 'free software' world, did AT THE TIME illustrate just the same pattern that the armtwisting of OEMs illustrated. Even if proprietary software is destined to become a historical curiosity (i.e. 'even if the future is like an RMS wet dream), at the time of the behavior, proprietary software was thought to be a market, and Microsoft's INTENT was not to deprecate the role of proprietary software, but to use their monopoly power to seize the market. The fact that their software highlights the failings of proprietary software (see the recent MSN Messenger outage! And they mean to use this stuff for .NET?) is not their intent, and you can't take that as an excuse to let them off. Just because they're digging their own grave doesn't mean you throw up your hands and let them off the hook. (*g* wonder how many more metaphors I can inflict on them in a single sentence?)
Microsoft is going to be _thwacked_ in some sort of way. Dunno just how, but count how many times 'everyone said' they were going to be let off, and then got totally screwed. It's not over. Suppose they get caught for threatening the New Mexico AG? "Do what we say, 'Patsy', and nobody gets hurt".
Microsoft are going to be _hosed_ with due process of law. Call that 'winning'? Cos I don't.
The article has a positively Jon Katzian glibness and is basically nothing more than a troll, for driving up page hits and sparking debate among slashdotters. This is fine for Jon Katz articles themselves (and part of Slashdot's charm), but look again! Isn't this the same site that was recently reported on as ZDNet's lame attempt to muscle sites like Anandtech out of their own market? Isn't it the very same site that was firmly identified as fake corporate grassroots? Why, goodness me, it is! And isn't this a site that would benefit from a slashdotting (build 'traffic' for PR purposes) and to become a recognizable name among techie geeks? I say it's at least 50/50 this article is a plant.
Now, they can't very well plant references in sites like Anand, because those people are too aware of the situation. But it looks like even without producing any sort of serious content, they can throw together some glib rabblerousing, get someone to plant it in Slashdot (again, 50/50 it was a plant vs. a real user) and move towards achieving their aims by building, or more accurately manufacturing, 'street cred'.
It's only a suggestion, but Slashdot story editors may wish to keep an eye out for Slash being used in this manner, and be slower to accept 'stories' that come from 'ExtremeTech'. That's just a suggestion. Personally, I would rather read Jon Katz: at least he's one of our own.
*hehehe*
I must strongly and completely disagree with the last three words. Don't even say 'end of story': it's utterly historically incorrect, misleading, conclusionary and just plain wrong.
I suggest 'for now' or 'at the moment'.
Seriously, much of the thinking on this subject is already obsolete. People are talking about the Web like it's TV. It's not- the key parts of the Web are where people interact with each other, getting involved. There are a lot of places where it would make sense to pay the participants, not charge them.
Then there's the next level: I personally have run two articles on Slashdot. Anyone can. You just have to do the work. Even without loading your to-be-slashdotted target pages with banner ads, exposure of that sort is valuable- but it is most valuable when it is not a hollow victory, when the person's put some serious effort into what's being reported on. Now, in a context of payment, does Slashdot pay those people- or expect to be paid by those people? What if there is such demand for Slashdot publicity that 'pay for publication' becomes as prevalent as 'pay to play' in live music?
At that point you're looking at a pretty ugly situation- and to go that direction belies the amount of benefit you get just from being Slashdot. Because of the freewheeling, non-paying nature of the site, a huge amount of activity has been spawned, and Slashdot's got name recognition among linux geeks comparable to Campbell's for soup or Crest for toothpaste. This is a tangible benefit while it's in force- if you run Slashdot and interact with others while your site is thriving, you are treated differently from just a run-of-the-mill geek.
If you can't turn that into money- well, maybe money isn't your first priority. But it's the kind of situation that could _lead_ to entrepeneurial activities- and the situation has a value beyond a simple counting of the money it directly produces. Income is cash but reputation is credit...
There is nobody who would be _more_ in favor of all forms of costless digital copying than Thomas Jefferson. It's the final, beautiful realisation of an ideal he had hundreds of years ago, and didn't have the capacity to truly bring to fruition.
Jefferson wouldn't have encouraged shoplifting, stealing of physical goods. But if you told him that it would be possible for anyone to grab a copy of every word, verbatim, of any book, without depriving the original person of their copy, and without costing significant money for labor or new materials involved with the copying? He would think that was _heaven_. And if you see things his way, it is... we owe it to Jefferson to see to it that this heaven of freely copyable data continues to be a reality, and I don't mean just napster, I mean stuff like Project Gutenberg AND napster AND search engines that can turn up all that information...
I'm an American, but I think that at this point, Germany in general is _wiser_ than we are on the subject. They have reason to be. The question is, do 'we' have sense enough to learn from history, or are 'we' going to be the ones repeating it this time around?
If we do, I am certainly not going to sit back and let it happen without an argument. So: no, it is NOT invariably 'OK to be proud of your country'. Not without taking responsibility for the actions of your country- and doing so may temper that pride with some wisdom and levelheadedness that are terribly valuable.
National pride can so EASILY be a problem that acknowledging this is extremely important. Ignoring it is dangerous- because the emotion, like mob mentality, _does_ come naturally to people, and horrible things can happen as a result.
Are you kidding? It's not an End User License Agreement. Anyone can _use_ GPLed stuff without a thought to the GPL. It is a _developer_ agreement, authorising not simply use, but re-hacking and redistribution. _User_ agreements don't give you the right to reprogram the damn app and start giving it out!
That is a very interesting point. To what extent do multinational corporations resemble colonial powers maintaining commercial operations in your country? Plainly there are some cases where this is not relevant, but I've seen plenty of instances where the resemblance is striking. For instance, McDonalds in France, India etc.
I mean, could you ask for a clearer sign that peaceful protest is useless? If you, personally, cannot be stopped from dumping oil in the ocean etc. by government means, what's left but terrorism? And if you take it as a challenge and begin to 'wage war' dedicatedly on the other side, do you honestly expect that your arrogance and stubbornness alone entitle you to win? I would suggest that this is a dangerous course of action that you should not follow.
If the Supreme Court upholds the findings of monopoly too, and you pull rank over them, can we just hire you as the sole judge in the US legal system? It would save a lot of money :)
Can we have a '-1: over 3K of straight Ayn Rand quoting'? o_O
The fact that they _are_ a monopoly makes it unreasonable to _demand_ that the new judge be one that's never used Microsoft products. In fact it would almost be an advantage- if the new judge is a Mac user who uses Netscape etc etc. it could be taken as bias because you're _expected_ to use the monopoly product _unless_ you are biased against it.
Given that the case is going back to a lower court, I have read one account that suggests further hearings can happen including a look into Microsoft's present actions. Personally, I think even without 'smart tags', they are still playing complete brinksmanship, but if they _also_ rolled out smart tags, it would just get ridiculous. Any lawyer would make mincemeat of them- a convicted monopolist doing an end run on all of HTML to present advertising links under its central control? Give me a _break!_ So, Microsoft is not _incredibly_ stupid, just incredibly arrogant. Even they can see that this would be a slamdunk in court, and so by some mysterious coincidence just before the appeals court ruling comes out, they back off on Smart Tags. We're not going to see the original concept for Smart Tags while the case is in court, it would be just too damaging legally to Microsoft's antitrust case. I guarantee you the lawyers said, "What are you, CRAZY? Put that away until we win this completely! Then you can have it." (Not that the MS lawyers are totally free from craziness themselves- but they can at least spot how damaging this would be to their case.)
If I'm not mistaken, the Apple 'Lisa' did this in 1984.
http://www.archaic-apples.com/lisa/lisa-retro.html #6
Why are so many people talking about Van Gogh rather than talking about taking pictures of industrial wastelands and applying the industrial wasteland filter to woodland scenes, or their own face, or computer renderings? This is potentially a _fascinating_ tool, and I want one. But the last thing I'd use it for is imitating paint brushstrokes. I can make brushstrokes with real paint, or fake brushstrokes with Painter or something. I can't make a digital image of a guitar made out of water ripples with anything but this- at least, not so effectively.
This _is_ a great thing, but it's not an artist replacement. It's a tool. It's convergence. Your ability to use it is very much dependent on what you can imagine, such as taking a portrait and doing it all in the textures of woodgrain while keeping the colors the same, or giving everything the textures of concrete, or fur, or cloth. The fact that it's not strictly texturemapping is what makes it potentially huge in significance...
bah... 'level' and 'mathematics'... way too busy, producing typos in haste.. :P
Now take a 640x480 256-color computer rendering. Is that art? The idea behind it may be, but the execution is horribly crude- it's like saying kid crayon drawings are fine art. Fine art's supposed to be _tough_, it takes years to have the craft of it together. The idea is, if you have computer rendering people doing things, what's produced by a person who's creatively brilliant _and_ has been rendering for 30 years _and_ has 27 Crays to play with? If you look at the 640x480 256-color compared with an oil painting it's unavoidable that the painting has _way_ _higher_ _resolution_ in every imaginable sense.
Once you have computer rendering people getting compulsively interested in the fractal-like details of their work, and not only producing resolutions that allow for distinctions in the thousandths-of-an-inch but CARING deeply about what's happening at that lever, then you will have gotten to the stage where rendering is a fine art. By comparison, in recent years digital audio has started to reach that stage: using different approaches to dithering, it's possible to take great interest in what's going on down at least-significant-bit level, and control the pervasive tone of the recording in a fractal sort of way.
The analogy is striking- in both cases, the original form (oil paints, analog tape) had obvious faults but also a capacity to record 'fractal' sorts of detail that people respond to. The patterns of brushstrokes, the subtleties of emotion in a horn's note... then both are 'replaced' by digital media, but the early forms of the media are completely incapable of recording that level of subtlety (ask a mastering engineer about 16 bit truncation sometime!) and it takes some progress and development before the media is up to delivering the same _type_ of satisfaction as the older, more primitive methods delivered as a matter of course.
If computer rendering is not considered a fine art, then you simply need more resolution. At the point where you can render a portrait of a person's room and have the dust on the floor produce a subliminal sense of desert sands, causing the room to 'feel' a certain way... or have the dust on the floor produce a subliminal sense of ocean waves causing the room to 'feel' another way without being obviously different... why, then you will have Fine Art. You have to have both the art and the craft together to the point where you are interested in subtleties like that, interested in the 'feel' of what you're creating. Having an idea is not enough- the work has to also have resolution enough to express a great deal about how you approached it and what your intentions were. It's possible that computer rendering, as it reaches truly fine-art levels of sophistication, will wind up speaking eloquently about _mothematics_ to the discerning, in ways that the untutored would simply not get... as if fine art appreciators of the future would go, "But the most daring element is where the texture of the piece delicately shifts from error diffusion to the hint of pattern dither in the shadows of the lady's face, as if something about her is a creation of the media" etc etc... and not in a Warhol-like hit-you-with-it way, but as if you'd use different processes intentionally, at a degree of subtlety that it would be almost impossible to even perceive it, but in the full intention of using every possible element of your process as an artistic element...
Your insistence on buying from companies with a good business plan etc. is only relevant when buying proprietary products. When buying commodity products you basically want to be satisfied of the immediate condition of the product because you can get service anywhere. It makes no business sense to treat Linux as a proprietary product- just because Caldera are demanding extra money does not mean their demand is sensible or justified.
I don't see how their unclearness on the concept qualifies as a good business plan to compete with commodity software.
At the time that was a very big deal- and it _did_ trigger an incredible explosion of consumer interest. I'd agree that Woz invented the personal computer. It was a hell of a big change from the Altair scene, which was really 'obsessive crazed hobbyist' land.