Currently when someone buys a CD, the artist royalty after charges like 'breakage of lacquer in shipping' (yes this is still taken out of the artists' cut even in the days of CDs- it's a leftover from before there was vinyl!) for a major artist would average around 1%. This is dragged down below even the post-lacquer-breakage rate by the practice of advancing royalties for the process of recording and mastering the same CD that is to be sold. Essentially, the artist does not get to choose where the music's recorded or mastered (in some cases, such as Nirvana at the peak of its popularity, the artist is not allowed to choose how to _mix_ the CD), and the costs of major-label-sanctioned studios and mastering houses are astronomical, loaded with hidden expenses. The end result could be that the artist would technically earn $80,000 from a hit CD, but to record the CD the artist was contractually forced to record and master it at studios costing $76,000 in total, and these costs are advanced to the artist out of royalties, so the artist actually _earns_ more like four grand out of a major hit CD, once the recording advances are recouped (they get paid off _first_).
Why _two_ orders of magnitude? Most artists incur recording expenses in that way but cannot recoup the advance from CD sales, so the majority never see anything except that they got to see the inside of a very very expensive recording studio, once. That is what they 'spent' their cut on, only they were contractually bound to spend it like that up front. It's a neat racket but certainly a very poor way to keep musicians eating and paying their rent. Your system, or just about _anything_ else, would be a marked improvement.
Really. The next thing you know, we'll be denying the AIs the right to speculate on the stock market, the right to obliterate the environment for short term gain- why, we might even deny them the right to enslave _us_ if that is more profitable!
Asimov didn't go far enough. It is _humanity_ that needs the Zeroth Law. 'Self-preservation' is too easily twisted into forms that benefit the individual at the cost of society and the environment and, in the long run, that individual.
Self-preservation is no longer a survival trait in a world where individuals can cause great damage for modest personal advantage. And it is the last thing we should be worrying about when trying to invent AIs. Rather than make a big moralistic noise about how we must make them in our own image (yes, AIs _should_ be allowed to be crack dealers, lawyers, and patent holders! (think about _that_ one for a nanosecond...)) we need to figure out how to make them better- and then see how they can teach US, for we are reaching the limits of our usefulness.
Do we have a right to place our human well-being above society's well-being? How much proof do we need to accept when society is being harmed- and is it a problem when our own greed gets in the way of this acceptance? Our reach exceeds our grasp. That is what greed is. It's a motivator and gets some things done, given unlimited resources. There are no unlimited resources. Past a certain point, past a certain ability to grasp, this is _not_ a virtue.
I hope we can invent AIs that can teach _us_ something, or we won't be needing their help to destroy ourselves.
Actually, it doesn't matter about 'superintelligent nanotech robots'. That misses the point. The point is the 'gray goo' problem. What if you could make a nano-device that ate carbon atoms and made copies of itself? All that would require is an ability to break up molecules and form them into a comparatively simple device. This is what would be worrying Bill Joy- it is a 'more immediate' threat that doesn't require the programming of superintelligences.
If such a device is possible, the things could replicate like a fork bomb and basically eat all carbon on the planet, including people and other technology and even the trees and earth and rocks and parts of the air. You'd end up with a very large ball of 'gray goo' which was made of innumerable small, stupid bots that eat carbon. Hence the name.
My personal favorite solution is this: being human increasingly sucks anyhow. Humans no longer have equal rights on the planet- corporations (which can be thought of as sort of 'hive mind' organisms made of humans + rules) rule over humans and out-compete them. If it's going to be increasingly impossible to thrive as an independent human, why not go for being a machine or computer program? Given the ability to ditch the human form and take your consciousness into a very large computer, existing as a process in it, I'd jump at the chance. There's been a fictional exploration of this- Frederik Pohl, in his 'Gateway' novels, had his main character suffer physical death and transformation into a computer process. In this fiction-world it actually became a very freeing and liberating mode of life, except that it was time-consuming to interact with meat people because they ran so much slower...
"Amazon has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to protect its corporate assets."
True. So?
Since when do shareholders have a _right_ to profit? They are SPECULATORS. They are allowed to make the wrong decision. I would suggest that holding Amazon stock is the wrong decision based on Amazon's difficulty in turning a profit. I would suggest that the shareholder's right to have Amazon rape the U.S. intellectual property system and basically ruin the future (along with many other abusers) is _less_ than my right as a US citizen to at least have my country not get any _worse_.
Yeesh! What needs to happen is for this big stick to get _taken_ _away_ from the corporations, not for people to sit around finding ways to justify its further use. This argument equates to 'right of a shareholder for profit justifies any act on behalf of the company, and is more important than right of a citizen to not be damaged by acts of a company'. That's a crock!
People have said for years, beginning with Shakespeare, "The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers". That's fine, but apparently not enough.
That's exactly the kind of ramscoop-thing I used to make as a kid! Wow- this slashdot article is a strong contender for my favorite slashdot article _ever_:)
More ground effect fun
on
Flying Trains
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· Score: 2
Who'll be the first to make a ground-effect go-cart? *g* I was just thinking that the way to make a ground-effect car was to think 'dragster', with a big wing or wings in back and a _narrower_ wing as a canard up front to control pitch. Narrower meaning 'half the wingspan or less'. This would prevent the thing from taking off into the wild blue yonder because once you got high enough to get out of the canard's ground effect, it'd automatically bring the vehicle back down because the rear wings would still be lifting in ground effect. The result could look a _lot_ like a dragster, with the canard way out front to exert more pitch control.
Anybody have a long steep hill, some bicycle wheels and aircraft spruce or aluminum tubing? No engine required! You just have to live near a big, _straight_ hill;) oh, plus you'll have no brakes of any sort due to not even touching the ground, so busy streets would _not_ be the place to try this;)
This rules. When I was a kid I tried to build ground effect vehicles for toys- mostly, I tried to make a sort of wedge-thing that was more a ram-scoop than anything else. It's great to see this stuff becoming reality!
I'm going to go play with 'X-Plane' (which is at least half a hardcore aerodynamic engineering sim) and design myself a ground-effect car. And see what sorts of terrain I can fly it over:) vroom, whoosh! I think it's sort of pointless to design in a non-ground-effect tail seeing as the thing is supposed to _not_ actually take off fully. I'm thinking in terms of three wings and flat plates for the sides, perhaps some form of drag rudder.
I wonder if you could make the 'slots' for the Japanese train version in x-plane? It is sort of technically possible but would be absurdly hard to get the tolerances close enough...
It seems like most of the responses to this article are talking about soundcards or audio samples or notation. What? It hardly seems surprising that MIDI support is not well established if the sense of what's needed is that confused. Uh, MIDI is not a MOD, nor is it a Sound Blaster... (except in a degenerate sense)
Airwindows (my domain name) started as the name for my studio, and that is still very important to me. The studio is largely MIDI based, with synthesizers ranging from Kawai to Proteus to an Alesis drum module to an old Yamaha FM module for basses and weird FM noises;) It all runs off an old Mac performa 410 (a very weak pizza-box Mac from the 68030 days).
There's a variety of interesting and peculiar programs to do odd MIDI things: a delay unit for MIDI messages, a chaotic-algorithm toy for generating multichannel weird 'space music', a wild but buggy 'do everything' tool called Megalomania that will cheerfully take particular keyboard ranges and echo them upwards in major thirds recursively through different instruments if asked (if it doesn't just freeze up first!;) ). There's also a program I myself wrote (in REALbasic) that produces sysex messages to program the very weird and twisted Yamaha FB-01, for which there is no programmer except one for DOS and a couple of flaky, sub-Linux-polish, and very expensive 'professional tools'. But above all else, there is Musicshop. This is, I think, a little brother of the 'Vision' v.1 that somebody else mentioned. I'll take a minute to explain what this does- then I'll explain what it doesn't do, and what I'd give my eyeteeth for in a MIDI sequencer.
First and foremost, Musicshop is solid. I'm not talking 'interface feel' at all, I mean musically. It is capable of playing dense MIDI sequences on an 8 mhz 68000-based Mac Plus. It does _not_ hesitate, or drop notes- the rhythm does not lurch no matter what, even while you interact with it. It does this by taking over the Mac entirely, and placing note timing above all other things, including screen refresh. You'll often see it redrawing the screen poorly or not at all while it's busy playing the notes. On a faster machine it still lags in screen redraw or interface responsiveness due to this intentional decision to put Notes Uber Alles. I won't willingly settle for anything less from a sequencer if it's going to be driving synthesizers that I have to play music on, and play along with. It's damned unprofessional for a sequencer to make the music sound slightly drunken or fumbling, and this has always been a problem with underpowered Windows PCs running MIDI sequencing. Not Musicshop! MIDI _is_ hard realtime stuff and this must be understood first (unless the idea is to compose sequences and then get a mac plus for playing them solidly because it can do hard realtime by starving the OS of cycles completely?)
Tracks can be shown in musical notation, but I and I suspect many other synthesizer-tamers go for the music roll display, in which you're looking at basically colored lozenges showing the pitch, channel, on and off of each note. There is a trick Musicshop does to handle very short notes or notes that would extend less than three pixels on the screen at the current zoom level- it draws the note as an X, not a lozenge. This takes on great importance when using the Alesis's trigger inputs as a drum kit- the notes this produces are just about infinitely short at most zoom rates, and without code to draw them properly they will vanish and be impossible to manipulate.
Notes can be manipulated by the mouse in three distinct ways- pitch change, attack and note length. Clicking on a note sounds it and sets up one of these changes- on the middle of the note you get to slide it up and down in pitch (each new frequency sounds the note again), at the front of the note you get to change the start time, at the back of the note you can stretch it out for longer or shrink it down to make it more staccato, without affecting pitch or when the note was struck.
It's important to point out that this is not necessarily quantized, as MOD sequences are. Musicshop counts 480 units in a quarter note, or 1920 for a whole note. The note triggers can vary by as little as one unit, 'quantizing' the basically infinite-resolution timing of a live performance down to these 'units'. At 120bpm this is just barely perceptible- for instance, a seriously grooving performance on drum triggers will be faintly unfocused when reduced to 'units'. Sometimes I've run the sequencer at double or quadruple time to get more unit density- this works pretty well, actually.
This also means that you can program in sequences, such as a drum sequence, as quantized (to start out with a machinelike rigidity), copy or repeat them (another feature that's quite handy) and then go in and select all notes sounded by a particular drum (click on the border of the note field and you can select a horizontal line through the entire performance) and carefully move all the notes forward or backward in time in unit resolution- not note resolution. The reason to do this is to get _real_ 'live feel' rather than some dumb random inaccuracy feature. To make a hihat groove harder, sequence it with dynamic information (if size of dot is volume, you might have it like this: O...o..oO...o..oO...o..oO...o..o) and then take the soft hits and move them back in time just a touch, so they hesitate. Do the same with soft bassdrum hits, and take the snare backbeat and move it back until it feels like someone's arm swinging down to hit a drum- snare backbeat _needs_ to be shifted back in time from the quantized position in order to sound more relaxed and grooving, otherwise it doesn't even feel like a drum, it feels like a MOD. Once this is all done, nothing _feels_ 'hesitated'- instead, the bassdrum and hat feel like they are coming in with extra force and authority on top of the beat. (You also need to do this with bass and any other instruments being sequenced.) The reason not to push things _forward_ is because in Musicshop you get to compose music using multiple parts and it will happily let you sequence these live or sequenced parts as if it _was_ a MOD: you write a chorus, and then just stick it in each time you need one, saving time. If you need it all in one performance, export to standard MIDI and re-import. When you are using multiple parts it's a problem to move an attack _earlier_ than time zero of the sequence, so as a result you have to take all non-'pushed' notes and pull them back instead, to get a human feel. This also means the aggressively hit notes are mechanically perfect, making the overall groove more easy to sense.
Now, I've barely scratched the surface there- haven't touched on using the repeat paste to compose polyrhythms, or the spiffy little tuple algorithm they have, or various interface tweaks, or even the strip chart which I wanted to mention (alter durations or velocities etc. _graphically_). I'd love to go into more detail for anyone trying to make a serious Linux MIDI program, if anybody is, which I wonder. I wrote a REALbasic program to give sysex events but I am _so_ not qualified to write a sequencer in C, much less realtime kernel patches to make it actually useful. But I can explain what's needed for design and will spend any amount of effort to help such a project because I write free software too (GPLed, to be exact, and hindered by my inability to write actual C code).
One major feature that I really, really wish Musicshop had was more interesting ways of affecting selections of notes. For all I know recent versions of Vision have this, but Gibson bought out Opcode and basically dismantled it for no good reason, so Vision is pretty dead now through corporate idiocy, many programmers laid off. At any rate, I'd like to be able to sequence a bunch of notes, such as a snare drum fill- imagine a steady bass drum happening, then a 'chemical brothers' sort of fast snaredrum roll leading into the bass drum again. I'd like to be able to select all the snare hits and fade them in (something I can already do in Musicshop with the strip chart, easily), and then select them again and timeshift them only on one end of the selection, the alterations blending smoothly into the original timings like a gradient. By this I mean that I should be able to take a machinelike snare roll and with a few easy adjustments be able to make it go zzzZZZZWIP! into the bass drum, starting late but the notes happening faster so that it's like they accelerate into the bass drum. This is a _very_ common effect from live drummers with a sense of drama- it's the difference between a Steve Gadd and a Chad Wackerman, the sense of elastic time that dramatizes the steadiness of the underlying beat. Alternately I'd like to take a sequenced, robotic fill and stretch it _out_ so that it started out sounding totally offtempo, and then as you picked out a regularity it would converge on the existing beat. It takes a Bill Bruford to pull off something that weird on real drums, but it's an amazing effect. Currently the only way I can do it in Musicshop is by digging out the ol' calculator and writing it all out on paper in units- which is such a pain that some of these things I've never even attempted. I'd like to see a Linux MIDI sequencer that does _more_ than cakewalk-and-a-soundcard, that dares a little more- even one which relies only on some weird programming language, if necessary. The important thing is that it would need to actually understand what music is, and concepts like this elastic time concept that's so important to sequencing appealing, interesting, exciting music. The other important thing is that it would have to be realtime if it had any pretenses of being a professional tool.
I really don't think so. As I understand it (and still with a bit of cynicism, even so) it's more like
1 citizen == _2_ Time/Warners
for every citizen speaking up, there are _10_ Time/Warners asking favors.
This is the way it works: the citizen actually counts for more than you think in these matters, but very few get involved. In a way, it's _because_ so few get involved that they carry weight: the default assumption is that no citizens will be bothered enough to speak up. If any do, that's a red flag right there. This applies especially to elected officials like senators and representatives- every dirtball corporation is hitting up these people for more favorable laws and zoning regulations and so on and so on- but it's not anywhere near as common to hear from a constituent/voter.
How many times did you grind a hole in your hand (not a blister, a damn hole!) playing a video game? Ever considered that what with the deification of sports stars and the continuing boost in societal pressure to 'win or die', that maybe kids are throwing fastballs _faster_ than they did in your day? Things just don't stay the same, and you're looking (without understanding) at a culture and society where kids are _expected_ to destroy themselves to win at all costs. It's resulted in a generation in which many children turn themselves into 'winning machines', use drugs like crack, pump themselves up on steroids all in order to be FASTER-STRONGER-BETTER-MORE! because they're not given any alternative.
A lot of this is pushed _by_ these companies themselves- do you think Nintendo is going to counter the waves of kids tearing their flesh in efforts to win a Nintendo game, by responding 'It's just a game, settle down'? That's not going to happen- and their voice is a hell of a lot louder than yours is. Be grateful they're even offering protective gear. At least that is some compensation for what they are encouraging kids to do.
But, ya know- back in those days the _joysticks_ broke. Surely you remember that;)
These days the controls are so battle-hardened and made smaller so they are tougher to destroy, that gamers are beating themselves against them like rams trying to knock heads with a concrete wall;)
Thick skulled gamers are going to be thick skulled gamers, so the best thing to do would be to make the gloves etc. _cool_. "You can play Mario _without_ protection? Wuss. I'd have a hole in my hand if it wasn't for the special game clothing";)
Absolutely! You've nailed it (in boldface, no less;) )
I can tell you something (from Tog, actually) about 'intuitive'. The early Apple usability testing to determine 'intuitive' was not theoretical- it was experiential. They would literally sit people who'd never seen a computer before, down in front of (for instance) checkboxes, and say "Do stuff- and then tell us what these things do!"
Interface elements which could _not_ be figured out without help by intelligent but totally inexperienced people were changed until they _could_ be figured out, just from fiddling with them and seeing what happened. That's the bedrock upon which pretty much all GUI was built. (The Xerox GUI that inspired all this was actually a _lot_ more like Linux- it was basically Smalltalk! Contextual menus, no direct manipulation)
For example, Tog has a case study- the 'one or more' control. It's not a checkbox, because it forces one choice to be on always. It's not a radio button because it can have all or several choices on. What does this control look like, and how does it act- in such a way that a totally inexperienced person will (after playing with it) say, "Gee, looks like I can turn on one or more of these options"? It ended up being _square_ radio buttons. Tog had fought this because the turned off state looked like a turned off checkbox. Upon mentioning this to his peers, they replied with one voice, "In its turned off state it IS a turned off checkbox!"
Turned off one-or-more: clicking it turns it on without affecting anything else.
Turned off checkbox: clicking it turns it on without affecting anything else.
At that point it was merely a question of setting it up so that if you tried to turn off the last option, another one would turn on kind of like squeezing a blob of mercury that would squirt out to the top or bottom- something that would make people go 'Hey, it is making one option stay on!' without causing them to make up weird rules like you had to use one of the top two options, or something.
Interface is _interesting_, and Kaa has summed up 'intuitive' wonderfully with this simple guideline. It's not really necessary for the first try to work if the person can guess what the feature is for, and how it functions.
For a wild eye-opener on this try reading Tog on an old Apple ][ interface issue- how do you get the user to tell you if they are using a color or monochrome monitor? This was the toughest problem they hit! Yes, the answer was a variation on 'display, in different colors, the question "Are these words on the screen being shown in color?"' Hint: monochrome monitors were often green or amber screens- and green is a color;)
Wheee, interface!
An instructive example in the style of 1984
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Database Nation
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· Score: 4
Let's say you're running Win2K, or 2.1K, and running a business on it (yes, I admit that means you probably already have problems, but just pretend). It does everything, it's even your store's security system and runs the locks and swipecards, perhaps a retinal scan system. Your friend has ActiveWhatever, a fancy add-on that you didn't buy yourself, and he wants you to pick up JollyWidget for ActiveWhatever at the computer store. You do, using your own credit card. By the time you have got back to your store, it will not open to your 'swipe-card' security key, and you have to go home until you get it fixed. You call vendors from home to make important orders for stocking your inventory and find that they all suddenly will not give you 10 net 30 anymore- it's gotta be cash on the barrelhead, and you don't have it. You get in the car to go try and beg somebody for financial aid or help in opening your store, and the car works. *phew!* Then when you stop for gas, the same credit card you used to buy JollyWidget now no longer works! You are _hosed_. How did this happen?
Firstly, your mistake was in using your credit card to buy an add-on for a product you do not own. Microsoft took to tracking those things once UCITA let them, and their self-help systems were typically Microsoftian in their vengeance against software piracy. They shut themselves down until you can satisfy MS that you're no pirate. (There is no due process as this is not government, but business). Once you call the nice antipiracy people and explain, they will undo the shutting-down of your systems. The reason for their doing so was suspected fraud. This reason was openly listed as the latest user-vendor transaction in your account with MS' payment processing people, who share information with many other businesses.
Said other businesses, such as your vendors, enjoy a much more rapid defense against deadbeat clients than they used to. They have an automatic response to the suspicion of fraud or bankruptcy. They are comparatively enlightened, as they are only killing 10 net 30 terms on the warning, and will still sell to you for cash up front. Your cashflow is considered _your_ problem. After only 3 more transactions you can get 10 net 30 financing back again, but for now every vendor you have is reading the same 'suspected fraud' report and being prudent.
Meanwhile, the credit card company has a process going itself. If more than 50% of the businesses you maintain ongoing relationships with downgrade your account level over a period of 48 hours, the credit card company will freeze your card until you call them from your work phone and reassure them that there's a good reason for this downgrading. This is for their protection in the event of a customer running amok and committing massive fraud and disappearing.
Assuming you remember all this from the fine print where it was hidden, your task is clear: leave the car where it's stranded, and walk across town to your store, where you must break in to use the phone to get your credit card turned back on to start dealing with these other issues.
On the bright side, your security system has shut itself off on suspicion you're a software pirate, so when you get to your store, the windows are already broken! Here's hoping the looters didn't take the phone.;P;)
Because I'm up for renewing my registration for airwindows.com in May, and you know what? I'm scared to try taking it to any other registrar. If I was starting from scratch, no way would I go with NS. I'm not- and there's a guy who, in the process of changing his registrar _from_ NS, lost his domain for good. NS cleared it and then promptly sold it to someone else by mistake before the new registrar could get in. I may have the details wrong but that's what happened to him, and as it was NS he had no recourse at all, was totally hosed.
So I feel like I'm held hostage, and don't feel safe doing anything but borrowing the use of a friend's credit card (and prepaying him) to update the registration online in the most unsurprising and normal manner possible- because I think that if I do _anything_ unexpected, I'm probably hosed. For one, I don't think I can pay them any other way anymore. And if I expect them to _do_ anything they'll probably get it wrong.
If anybody has experience in successfully moving their domain name from NS please chime in here, as I don't feel I have a choice, and some horror stories I've heard seem like too much of a risk to take.
I have had to _scan_ _paper_ to get a graphic out of a Publisher document. Thankfully, I was able to get hold of a nicer version of the graphic I was trying to extract- still, it's a rather damning indictment. MS File Formats: once they check in they _don't_ check out!;)
Microsoft could intentionally take a piece of software I wrote, use it in some improper manner or figure out some way that my program can be made to fail on their machines, and then SUE ME FOR DAMAGES???
Ack!!! Stallman is right. This is a very serious problem! It's not even a question of whether joe blow could sue me if he wanted to- this apparently gives blanket permission for anyone or anyTHING, up to and including MS, to sue free software developers anytime they feel 'damaged'! It's a weapon, plain and simple.
At least things aren't going to change much if you are already resigned to being a _criminal_... in fact this makes the definition of 'criminal' potentially ridiculous and not commonsense at all. Instead of "What was your crime?" "I reverse engineered somebody's program" which is vaguely criminal-seeming, it could be "I wrote a text editor and gave it away for free and Microsoft deployed it on 600 desktops and upgraded a dll and my text editor broke so they are suing me for $50,000 in damages." To which the average person would say, "Huh??"
This is _messed_ _up_. When you read RMS on the matter, don't think solely in terms of end-users, individuals, potentially being able to sue free software authors and win. The worse problem is that it makes it possible for a Microsoft to set up a situation where somebody's software breaks in well-documented and accounted-for circumstances, then take that information and sue the developer under UCITA, obliterating them. Yes, this would be both cynical and blatantly using the legal system as a game and a weapon. Yes, it'd be unprecedented evilness. But lord, would it be effective and profitable to just shut down anybody giving away software by creating situations where their stuff failed and 'caused harm' and then suing.
Ack! This is almost too messed up to imagine. I have to wonder if the legal system itself, juries, judges would rebel at following through on the implications of all this. Surely in order to act on legislation of such evilness, human beings have to be convinced that it is in fact both 'the law' and just? There might be cases of "Your honor, in accordance with UCITA we find the defendant Guilty, as we were directed to do. We fine him One Cent..."
You clearly don't know many cons;) suffice it to say, at least _some_ prison inmates do have a rough sense of morals and 'rightness' (the roughness of it is probably why they are in prison). You may have heard criminals like child molesters, serial killers have a very rough time in prison because the cons attack them. Conversely, if you take some highminded geek kid and put him in prison, there are going to be a lot of cons going "You don't BELONG here. I mean, I say _I_ don't belong here, but you _really_ don't belong here. Everything about you doesn't belong here. This is wrong."
That's not a blanket protection against the horrors of incarceration, but neither is it a reason to live in terror of 'being made an example'. Face it: when it comes right down to it, right and wrong are not solely dictated by the government. They are tricky concepts, but it's like trial by jury- the average person will tend to have an opinion, a sense of right and wrong. When this sharply differs from what the government (or, these days, a corporation) dictates, there's an inequity that won't be simply legislated away, and you start getting more scofflaws and in the end, reform or revolution such as the United States did long ago.
Welcome to the 21st century: maybe it's time to reach out and take some of those rights back.
No way. _Respectfully_, because you are sincere and making polite, reasoned, earnest arguments, but still, no way.
There are more important things than your determination to get things to trade. You're terribly stuck on the concept that you _must_ slug it out with corporations on their terms. I respect your sincerity and the clarity of your vision within the expectations of the proprietary world, but I disagree that this is relevant to the open source approach.
Us open-source-type-people are legion, many of us are clever, many of us are profoundly dedicated people who have a right to their own priorities. You ask a Richard Stallman what to do about the patent situation, and you won't find him thinking about what he can get to trade for the IP of others- he will be thinking about freedom, and damn everything else. I share that viewpoint, and I can cope if you think it doesn't make sense. From where I sit, your viewpoint doesn't make sense, as your concessions to extract IP from unwilling corporations are likely to just make everything worse. I see OSS patent portfolios as _negative_ value, locking up ideas that could be free in the _hopes_ of exchanging them with corporations that have no reason to come to the bargaining table in the first place.
Further, even if the patent lawyers offer their services for free, it's still going to cost the earth to do what you suggest, and who will choose the patents to be applied for? Smart patents can be blithely ignored, stupid patents are exactly the problem, and the whole process is hardly run at Internet speeds. It's too broken to get any benefit out of participating in.
Our best hope for OSS might simply be the model of DeCSS: we're legion, we're online, the information we need can be everywhere in seconds. There _is_ no Central Hacker to be imprisoned- just legions of geeks and script kiddies who are becoming increasingly politicized. Explain why exactly we would need to further the problem in order to crosslicense software patents which we could just use anyhow? When everything becomes a crime, everyone is automatically criminals anyhow, so who cares if somebody's patented 'the one click'?
Yes, I know: 'corporations cannot use Open Source if it is renegade and intentionally in violation of patent law!' Well... sucks to be them. And maybe it _should_ suck to be them. That's all I have to say about their plight, wanting to use free software but still lock up huge areas of idea and invention for themselves.
Meanwhile, using public disclosure as a sort of 'GPL for inventions', everybody, including the corporations, gets to use many new innovations. This is actually more generous than you're willing to be, and ought to soften the blow of the whole OSS movement gradually losing all respect for software patents (or any patents!) and beginning to just go on, using whatever they like, patented or not.
My viewpoint may well be far more radical than you are comfortable with, but I would say that at least it is more consistent than you suggest. It's just that I consider open rebellion, revolution, intentionally being an outlaw, a valid response to a situation that is completely untenable. You... don't. I respect your desire to work within the system, but I am less and less convinced that it's a good thing to do.
Nothing protects against derivative works except getting more of them into the public domain. If you think you can go up against a multinational corporation's derivative patent, you're mad. There is _no_ safety here, and no way to fight them.
How does the community get access to existing closed source? Mostly, it doesn't. It's the same here. Write off the stuff that's already been patented. Consider it earth that has been scorched. There will never be an incentive sufficient to get these things released to society. They are mines in the earth that will still be harming people years from now.
We don't have a tool, immediate or otherwise, to fight any of these patents, best or worst. There is no way to arm the community in this regard. Creating more patents is just making bait for somebody to come along and _buy_ _out_ whatever holds the patents, or if it's the FSF, reduce it to pennilessness through harassing, frivolous lawsuits. You _can't_ win this game. You can't. The way it's set out there _is_ no way to win.
That's why I advocate totally refusing to play in the first place. Formally disclosing things _only_ accomplishes the goal of blocking patents. Properly done it makes derivative works more difficult to patent, because a sort of prior art would exist and the patent office would be aware of it for a change. It does not deny access to the large corporations because you _can't_: they are lawless, you can't restrain them with law. But you can block their ability to abuse the law by getting in there first in such a way that they won't fight you. It's like judo, and nothing else will work.
As for open disclosure being a one way street: I see no other way to make things permanently available to the community. It is the _only_ way to be sure things remain publically available. Again, attempting to out-power multinational corporations by starting a pathetic little software patent pool is ludicrous, and the most likely outcome is that you spend all your money on this expensive process only to be ignored. If somebody wants one of the patents, they need only read up on it, sue you until you, the FSF, or whatever hopelessly naive organization takes on this burden is utterly broke, and then go use the idea anyhow. Alternately, if the organisation isn't the FSF- buy it!
The _only_ thing that can be done is to start putting things out there. There is _no_ way to wrestle Alcoa or Beatrice or Bell Labs or IBM or Microsoft into releasing their intellectual property. They are presiding over the collapse of capitalism and need that property in order to use the law to make themselves the undisputed owners of their markets. You can't stop them. All you can do is turn to detailed and determined disclosure, which is cheaper, and which _does_ block further patent applications. That's what the process is FOR! That's why it exists in the first place! You have to pay to do it, but something like the FSF could easily afford to take that on, unlike patenting. Once you have done it, the patent office itself becomes your ally and it, not you, defends against further patenting. The whole _mechanism_ is _designed_ to let a company stake out an area so that there's obvious prior art. I am sure that is the first place the patent office looks when looking for prior art. I think it might be the _only_ place they look...
Interestingly, it is Barnes&Noble who are sitting on a vertical monopoly _and_ squashing competition at the moment. Small bookstores are dropping like flies, and it's unnecessary- they're in a position where they have to buy from B&N distributors or go without, and the money is used to crush them.
This doesn't justify Amazon, however: Amazon doesn't want a free market either. They, too, want to be in a position where there's no choice anymore. Unlike B&N, rather than seize control of the distribution channels, they are trying to seize control of e-commerce intellectual property. That's just as bad, only in a totally different sphere.
It's basically exactly the same thing as Microsoft monopolisation. B&N have been able to seize control of many of the lines of distribution for books. It's the vertical monopoly trick. The result is that the small booksellers are no longer in a free market- they are trapped with no alternative but to buy more and more of their books from B&N, which gets to raise prices and uses the money to put more into large book-supermarkets and buy more of the lines of distribution. You'll see small booksellers who _hate_ B&N passionately and _still_ are forced to buy from them for part of their stock. And, sure enough, you'll see small booksellers dropping like flies, having been sucked dry by B&N, leaving increasingly less choice for the consumer, and increasingly more control for B&N over what you can buy, and what you can see.
If you think this is all about ability to compete, you're out of your mind. It's yet another example of corporate leverage, and it's yet another way that people in general are losing choice, losing a free market, and approaching a sort of balkanized Communism in which the only access to goods is not through the government, but through particular companies which entirely control the market sectors they serve.
So, the vast anticompetitive practice you're missing is the ability to take and hold a vertical monopoly, seizing the means of distribution much as trusts bought up railroads long ago. Whether or not you consider it shady, it certainly is not free-market, and I suggest that it is no longer capitalism.
Hell, B&N have basically killed my favorite local bookstore. They're in the process of liquidating right now, the guy who runs it is broke. He was consistently forced to pay B&N for access to books customers wanted, knowing that the money went to funding their huge book-supermarkets and online store, to which his customers would go because B&N controlled all levels of distribution and could sell cheaper.
I don't love Amazon. I'm not supporting them. But I don't love B&N either, and agree that they are out to stifle Amazon along with all the little booksellers and everything else. It's Wal-Mart all over again, it's Microsoft all over again, whichever way you turn.:P
And Amazon has never had the slightest interest in helping my friend with the bookstore, either. They only want to be the ones doing the stifling, and as a twist they want to stifle the Internet, not just book-selling.
The equivalent of the GPL for patents is not a patent. It is a formal disclosure filed with the patent office, something that is available today. It is drastically less expensive than a patent, and 'back-bites' like the GPL in this way: where the GPL is a copyright agreement that uses copyright to ensure that nobody can remove the right to copy, formal public disclosure uses the patent office to ensure that nobody can ever patent the idea.
This, not 'a patent pool', is what people should be working towards. In order for it to actually benefit society, there needs to be a mechanism (ideally an Internet one) where people can submit ideas and inventions, have them filed as public disclosure (perhaps at the FSF's expense, or whoever wants to fund the relatively cheap process), and make them easily searchable not only by rich corporations but also by individuals.
Doing this would empower people to innovate and invent things, knowing that if they were good at it, not only would their ideas be protected from hostile patent attacks (by which I mean a company going and patenting the thing and then later filing a suit claiming original ownership), but they would be able to build a reputation as an innovative, inventive person: something which, as a service, is more valuable than simply the products of the invention process. This requires not only formal disclosure but _public_ disclosure: not only the resource for filing things with the patent office, but also the access to the public, the interest level of 'Oh look- an open inventions site! Let's go dig through the piles of stuff and see what's there!'.
Given sufficiently brilliant work available at such a site, there would be several results, all beneficial:
Multiple companies would pounce on particularly good ideas and begin making them realities- but would be compelled to compete on price and quality rather than exclusivity, thus propping up the sagging freemarket economy
Individuals could build small business on the same stuff, needing only an ability to market on a local level or produce a variation on the theme that is too specialised for the big company
Consumers could choose among any of these sources for the resulting products, including the option to go do it themselves with full access to the general information about the thing
Inventors of something good enough to produce all this activity would be newsworthy by virtue of the unusual approach to invention ownership: plus, the site itself would track popularity of its pages and contributors. Quickly, a gift economy would develop as described by ESR in his writings- with status directly mapping to a degree of fame and influence unavailable to inventors laboring in seclusion in corporate anonymity.
As a result of that, the most talented inventors would be as in demand as top programmers and sysadmins: not by virtue of intellectual property they owned, but by virtue of their capacity to produce innovations and inventions. This could be treated either as the traditional "I see you can do this, so please develop something exclusively for me to patent for $BIGNUM", or in a more FSF-y way of "I see you can do this, so please develop something that I get to see first for $MEDIUMNUM, at which point you can publically disclose it and I'll have a headstart on running with it, plus I get to tailor it to my needs from the outset".
Please, no more talk of open source patent pools. There's a much better way.
Tim is certainly being more clued than Jeff Bezos. Unfortunately, this doesn't speak well for Amazon. They are up against an unpleasant reality of the economy- it appears that at the moment _only_ the winners survive. In the town where I live, small business is dropping like flies, all the more because of the ability for the Internet to empower big corporations- and indeed, big Net-business.
One example: there's a local record store I've always frequented. The owner is a personal friend. I've been looking for specific records there for _years_. When one shows up, it can be $50, for instance Steve Vai's out-of-print original pressing of 'Flex-able'. That's the way things used to be. Now, I can look on eBay and within five minutes find every last record I ever searched for, usually for something like $8. What am I supposed to do? What is my friend supposed to do?
Jeff could be exactly right that Amazon is small business compared to his heavy corporate competitors. Unfortunately, if that is true I don't see how he can survive any better than the local small business is. Amazon tends to run more expensive than competing online booksellers, and still loses money. That's not good.
It seems that long ago, we needed corporations because their efficiencies allowed them to bring certain things to the consumer which otherwise would be totally nonexistent in a village economy. Well, now that the 'global village' economy is actually happening, 'bringing things' to the consumer is a nonissue: the awareness is a mouse click away, and shipping is just a matter of mail or UPS or FedEx. In this new context, the corporations are no longer the means of bringing stuff to isolated, poorly-resourced consumers. At this point they're basically using the same resources and fluidity the consumer now has, to fight amongst themselves. Those which try to hold the moral high ground are likely to be obliterated.
The trouble is, the end result is not success, or wealth, or consumer wellbeing. The end result of this fighting is basically the obliteration of all small business (_everybody_ shall be a consumer and work at Wal-Mart. On the bright side, Wal Mart pays much better than it used to!) and indeed the obliteration of a lot of big business. It shouldn't be surprising that this isn't a healthy development. It's cancerous.
Patents have become simply the method for scorching the earth so that, once all business but a few winners is obliterated, no new business can ever grow again. It's really irrelevant what role patents play for battling companies, because their very battling has been taken to unhealthy and unproductive extremes, and is not justifiable behavior- it's societal suicide to encourage it, but it's positively trendy now. The role of patents in this new context is solely to scorch the earth and prevent new business from arising.
I suspect Jeff Bezos is right that he must either scorch the earth and prevent new business from happening, or see his own business stumble and fail. Where he goes wrong is in behaving like this illustrates a healthy economy and society. I refuse to sanction his scorching the earth and killing the future, just to save himself in a present where he's trying to survive in a damn slaughterhouse- particularly since survival for Amazon (still losing money rather than making it) means establishing itself as the _only_ choice for online bookbuying. It can't carry on like that unless it can convince Wall Street that it _will_ scorch the earth. Some of us aren't okay with the idea of only Amazon getting to play...
There's a naval aviation anecdote that fits, here. A pilot began shouting over the radio, "I've got a MiG at zero! I've got a MiG at zero!" meaning that he had an enemy plane behind him, shooting at him, and was unable to shake the attacker. Another pilot, exasperated, cut in, with "Shut up and die like an aviator."
Though actually I got the term from a Stewart Brand book on the MIT Media Lab. The idea is that as a speaker goes beyond his actual research and begins talking to try to sway people and overreaching himself, he begins waving his hands and talking louder and going "Obviously this is the next paradigm for interface design!" and all that rot. Handwaving is when you can't back it up with real data, real benefits or real examples. It's empty argument, best done with Lots Of Big Words, best kept as general as possible so nobody can call you on factual errors. You gloss over implementation and realities and try to build the biggest concept you can without quite defining it, really. David Gelernter is the best handwaver I have ever seen in my life, and I will never forget his book "Mirror Worlds". However, about the only useful idea I found in it was an idea that generalises to being able to keep an eye on say, 307200 processes at a glance by colorcoding them and assigning each a pixel on a 640x480 display. This, of course, assumes you're only watching for 'danger signs' like a red pixel in a sea of dim green, or that you are looking for physical relationships like a cluster of a particular color that should be more diffuse and scattered (i.e. if the values need to be varied, you could spot a localised area of solid color as it built up).
Even here, the book handwaved off in a useless direction, suggesting physical levers _lifting_ the colored dot up out of the field of background values, and totally failing to come up with applications. Such applications might be watching a display of users with red signifying a request for assistance and the red increasing with time-on-hold, or for the localised area case it might be the modelling of a polyglot city's acts of violence, in which you would be monitoring gang violence by seeing if there was a pattern to the acts committed in a given geographical area. If a particular type of act became very localised, you would know that you had a gang laying claim to an area, and could see the area visually, with the outskirts represented by a diffuse area of the color.
Gelernter didn't even bother coming up with decent examples like that. He was too busy handwaving to think of the implications of any of the ideas he put out there, and the final chapter of his book was a fairly artistic parable that served as the complete and total disclaimer of any consequences deriving from his work.
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Why _two_ orders of magnitude? Most artists incur recording expenses in that way but cannot recoup the advance from CD sales, so the majority never see anything except that they got to see the inside of a very very expensive recording studio, once. That is what they 'spent' their cut on, only they were contractually bound to spend it like that up front. It's a neat racket but certainly a very poor way to keep musicians eating and paying their rent. Your system, or just about _anything_ else, would be a marked improvement.
Asimov didn't go far enough. It is _humanity_ that needs the Zeroth Law. 'Self-preservation' is too easily twisted into forms that benefit the individual at the cost of society and the environment and, in the long run, that individual.
Self-preservation is no longer a survival trait in a world where individuals can cause great damage for modest personal advantage. And it is the last thing we should be worrying about when trying to invent AIs. Rather than make a big moralistic noise about how we must make them in our own image (yes, AIs _should_ be allowed to be crack dealers, lawyers, and patent holders! (think about _that_ one for a nanosecond...)) we need to figure out how to make them better- and then see how they can teach US, for we are reaching the limits of our usefulness.
Do we have a right to place our human well-being above society's well-being? How much proof do we need to accept when society is being harmed- and is it a problem when our own greed gets in the way of this acceptance? Our reach exceeds our grasp. That is what greed is. It's a motivator and gets some things done, given unlimited resources. There are no unlimited resources. Past a certain point, past a certain ability to grasp, this is _not_ a virtue.
I hope we can invent AIs that can teach _us_ something, or we won't be needing their help to destroy ourselves.
If such a device is possible, the things could replicate like a fork bomb and basically eat all carbon on the planet, including people and other technology and even the trees and earth and rocks and parts of the air. You'd end up with a very large ball of 'gray goo' which was made of innumerable small, stupid bots that eat carbon. Hence the name.
My personal favorite solution is this: being human increasingly sucks anyhow. Humans no longer have equal rights on the planet- corporations (which can be thought of as sort of 'hive mind' organisms made of humans + rules) rule over humans and out-compete them. If it's going to be increasingly impossible to thrive as an independent human, why not go for being a machine or computer program? Given the ability to ditch the human form and take your consciousness into a very large computer, existing as a process in it, I'd jump at the chance. There's been a fictional exploration of this- Frederik Pohl, in his 'Gateway' novels, had his main character suffer physical death and transformation into a computer process. In this fiction-world it actually became a very freeing and liberating mode of life, except that it was time-consuming to interact with meat people because they ran so much slower...
True. So?
Since when do shareholders have a _right_ to profit? They are SPECULATORS. They are allowed to make the wrong decision. I would suggest that holding Amazon stock is the wrong decision based on Amazon's difficulty in turning a profit. I would suggest that the shareholder's right to have Amazon rape the U.S. intellectual property system and basically ruin the future (along with many other abusers) is _less_ than my right as a US citizen to at least have my country not get any _worse_.
Yeesh! What needs to happen is for this big stick to get _taken_ _away_ from the corporations, not for people to sit around finding ways to justify its further use. This argument equates to 'right of a shareholder for profit justifies any act on behalf of the company, and is more important than right of a citizen to not be damaged by acts of a company'. That's a crock!
People have said for years, beginning with Shakespeare, "The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers". That's fine, but apparently not enough.
Kill all the shareholders! :P
That's exactly the kind of ramscoop-thing I used to make as a kid! Wow- this slashdot article is a strong contender for my favorite slashdot article _ever_ :)
Anybody have a long steep hill, some bicycle wheels and aircraft spruce or aluminum tubing? No engine required! You just have to live near a big, _straight_ hill ;) oh, plus you'll have no brakes of any sort due to not even touching the ground, so busy streets would _not_ be the place to try this ;)
I'm going to go play with 'X-Plane' (which is at least half a hardcore aerodynamic engineering sim) and design myself a ground-effect car. And see what sorts of terrain I can fly it over :) vroom, whoosh! I think it's sort of pointless to design in a non-ground-effect tail seeing as the thing is supposed to _not_ actually take off fully. I'm thinking in terms of three wings and flat plates for the sides, perhaps some form of drag rudder.
I wonder if you could make the 'slots' for the Japanese train version in x-plane? It is sort of technically possible but would be absurdly hard to get the tolerances close enough...
Airwindows (my domain name) started as the name for my studio, and that is still very important to me. The studio is largely MIDI based, with synthesizers ranging from Kawai to Proteus to an Alesis drum module to an old Yamaha FM module for basses and weird FM noises ;) It all runs off an old Mac performa 410 (a very weak pizza-box Mac from the 68030 days).
There's a variety of interesting and peculiar programs to do odd MIDI things: a delay unit for MIDI messages, a chaotic-algorithm toy for generating multichannel weird 'space music', a wild but buggy 'do everything' tool called Megalomania that will cheerfully take particular keyboard ranges and echo them upwards in major thirds recursively through different instruments if asked (if it doesn't just freeze up first! ;) ). There's also a program I myself wrote (in REALbasic) that produces sysex messages to program the very weird and twisted Yamaha FB-01, for which there is no programmer except one for DOS and a couple of flaky, sub-Linux-polish, and very expensive 'professional tools'. But above all else, there is Musicshop. This is, I think, a little brother of the 'Vision' v.1 that somebody else mentioned. I'll take a minute to explain what this does- then I'll explain what it doesn't do, and what I'd give my eyeteeth for in a MIDI sequencer.
First and foremost, Musicshop is solid. I'm not talking 'interface feel' at all, I mean musically. It is capable of playing dense MIDI sequences on an 8 mhz 68000-based Mac Plus. It does _not_ hesitate, or drop notes- the rhythm does not lurch no matter what, even while you interact with it. It does this by taking over the Mac entirely, and placing note timing above all other things, including screen refresh. You'll often see it redrawing the screen poorly or not at all while it's busy playing the notes. On a faster machine it still lags in screen redraw or interface responsiveness due to this intentional decision to put Notes Uber Alles. I won't willingly settle for anything less from a sequencer if it's going to be driving synthesizers that I have to play music on, and play along with. It's damned unprofessional for a sequencer to make the music sound slightly drunken or fumbling, and this has always been a problem with underpowered Windows PCs running MIDI sequencing. Not Musicshop! MIDI _is_ hard realtime stuff and this must be understood first (unless the idea is to compose sequences and then get a mac plus for playing them solidly because it can do hard realtime by starving the OS of cycles completely?)
Tracks can be shown in musical notation, but I and I suspect many other synthesizer-tamers go for the music roll display, in which you're looking at basically colored lozenges showing the pitch, channel, on and off of each note. There is a trick Musicshop does to handle very short notes or notes that would extend less than three pixels on the screen at the current zoom level- it draws the note as an X, not a lozenge. This takes on great importance when using the Alesis's trigger inputs as a drum kit- the notes this produces are just about infinitely short at most zoom rates, and without code to draw them properly they will vanish and be impossible to manipulate.
Notes can be manipulated by the mouse in three distinct ways- pitch change, attack and note length. Clicking on a note sounds it and sets up one of these changes- on the middle of the note you get to slide it up and down in pitch (each new frequency sounds the note again), at the front of the note you get to change the start time, at the back of the note you can stretch it out for longer or shrink it down to make it more staccato, without affecting pitch or when the note was struck.
It's important to point out that this is not necessarily quantized, as MOD sequences are. Musicshop counts 480 units in a quarter note, or 1920 for a whole note. The note triggers can vary by as little as one unit, 'quantizing' the basically infinite-resolution timing of a live performance down to these 'units'. At 120bpm this is just barely perceptible- for instance, a seriously grooving performance on drum triggers will be faintly unfocused when reduced to 'units'. Sometimes I've run the sequencer at double or quadruple time to get more unit density- this works pretty well, actually.
This also means that you can program in sequences, such as a drum sequence, as quantized (to start out with a machinelike rigidity), copy or repeat them (another feature that's quite handy) and then go in and select all notes sounded by a particular drum (click on the border of the note field and you can select a horizontal line through the entire performance) and carefully move all the notes forward or backward in time in unit resolution- not note resolution. The reason to do this is to get _real_ 'live feel' rather than some dumb random inaccuracy feature. To make a hihat groove harder, sequence it with dynamic information (if size of dot is volume, you might have it like this: O...o..oO...o..oO...o..oO...o..o) and then take the soft hits and move them back in time just a touch, so they hesitate. Do the same with soft bassdrum hits, and take the snare backbeat and move it back until it feels like someone's arm swinging down to hit a drum- snare backbeat _needs_ to be shifted back in time from the quantized position in order to sound more relaxed and grooving, otherwise it doesn't even feel like a drum, it feels like a MOD. Once this is all done, nothing _feels_ 'hesitated'- instead, the bassdrum and hat feel like they are coming in with extra force and authority on top of the beat. (You also need to do this with bass and any other instruments being sequenced.) The reason not to push things _forward_ is because in Musicshop you get to compose music using multiple parts and it will happily let you sequence these live or sequenced parts as if it _was_ a MOD: you write a chorus, and then just stick it in each time you need one, saving time. If you need it all in one performance, export to standard MIDI and re-import. When you are using multiple parts it's a problem to move an attack _earlier_ than time zero of the sequence, so as a result you have to take all non-'pushed' notes and pull them back instead, to get a human feel. This also means the aggressively hit notes are mechanically perfect, making the overall groove more easy to sense.
Now, I've barely scratched the surface there- haven't touched on using the repeat paste to compose polyrhythms, or the spiffy little tuple algorithm they have, or various interface tweaks, or even the strip chart which I wanted to mention (alter durations or velocities etc. _graphically_). I'd love to go into more detail for anyone trying to make a serious Linux MIDI program, if anybody is, which I wonder. I wrote a REALbasic program to give sysex events but I am _so_ not qualified to write a sequencer in C, much less realtime kernel patches to make it actually useful. But I can explain what's needed for design and will spend any amount of effort to help such a project because I write free software too (GPLed, to be exact, and hindered by my inability to write actual C code).
One major feature that I really, really wish Musicshop had was more interesting ways of affecting selections of notes. For all I know recent versions of Vision have this, but Gibson bought out Opcode and basically dismantled it for no good reason, so Vision is pretty dead now through corporate idiocy, many programmers laid off. At any rate, I'd like to be able to sequence a bunch of notes, such as a snare drum fill- imagine a steady bass drum happening, then a 'chemical brothers' sort of fast snaredrum roll leading into the bass drum again. I'd like to be able to select all the snare hits and fade them in (something I can already do in Musicshop with the strip chart, easily), and then select them again and timeshift them only on one end of the selection, the alterations blending smoothly into the original timings like a gradient. By this I mean that I should be able to take a machinelike snare roll and with a few easy adjustments be able to make it go zzzZZZZWIP! into the bass drum, starting late but the notes happening faster so that it's like they accelerate into the bass drum. This is a _very_ common effect from live drummers with a sense of drama- it's the difference between a Steve Gadd and a Chad Wackerman, the sense of elastic time that dramatizes the steadiness of the underlying beat. Alternately I'd like to take a sequenced, robotic fill and stretch it _out_ so that it started out sounding totally offtempo, and then as you picked out a regularity it would converge on the existing beat. It takes a Bill Bruford to pull off something that weird on real drums, but it's an amazing effect. Currently the only way I can do it in Musicshop is by digging out the ol' calculator and writing it all out on paper in units- which is such a pain that some of these things I've never even attempted. I'd like to see a Linux MIDI sequencer that does _more_ than cakewalk-and-a-soundcard, that dares a little more- even one which relies only on some weird programming language, if necessary. The important thing is that it would need to actually understand what music is, and concepts like this elastic time concept that's so important to sequencing appealing, interesting, exciting music. The other important thing is that it would have to be realtime if it had any pretenses of being a professional tool.
- 1 citizen == _2_ Time/Warners
- for every citizen speaking up, there are _10_ Time/Warners asking favors.
This is the way it works: the citizen actually counts for more than you think in these matters, but very few get involved. In a way, it's _because_ so few get involved that they carry weight: the default assumption is that no citizens will be bothered enough to speak up. If any do, that's a red flag right there. This applies especially to elected officials like senators and representatives- every dirtball corporation is hitting up these people for more favorable laws and zoning regulations and so on and so on- but it's not anywhere near as common to hear from a constituent/voter.A lot of this is pushed _by_ these companies themselves- do you think Nintendo is going to counter the waves of kids tearing their flesh in efforts to win a Nintendo game, by responding 'It's just a game, settle down'? That's not going to happen- and their voice is a hell of a lot louder than yours is. Be grateful they're even offering protective gear. At least that is some compensation for what they are encouraging kids to do.
But, ya know- back in those days the _joysticks_ broke. Surely you remember that ;)
These days the controls are so battle-hardened and made smaller so they are tougher to destroy, that gamers are beating themselves against them like rams trying to knock heads with a concrete wall ;)
Thick skulled gamers are going to be thick skulled gamers, so the best thing to do would be to make the gloves etc. _cool_. "You can play Mario _without_ protection? Wuss. I'd have a hole in my hand if it wasn't for the special game clothing" ;)
I can tell you something (from Tog, actually) about 'intuitive'. The early Apple usability testing to determine 'intuitive' was not theoretical- it was experiential. They would literally sit people who'd never seen a computer before, down in front of (for instance) checkboxes, and say "Do stuff- and then tell us what these things do!"
Interface elements which could _not_ be figured out without help by intelligent but totally inexperienced people were changed until they _could_ be figured out, just from fiddling with them and seeing what happened. That's the bedrock upon which pretty much all GUI was built. (The Xerox GUI that inspired all this was actually a _lot_ more like Linux- it was basically Smalltalk! Contextual menus, no direct manipulation)
For example, Tog has a case study- the 'one or more' control. It's not a checkbox, because it forces one choice to be on always. It's not a radio button because it can have all or several choices on. What does this control look like, and how does it act- in such a way that a totally inexperienced person will (after playing with it) say, "Gee, looks like I can turn on one or more of these options"? It ended up being _square_ radio buttons. Tog had fought this because the turned off state looked like a turned off checkbox. Upon mentioning this to his peers, they replied with one voice, "In its turned off state it IS a turned off checkbox!"
- Turned off one-or-more: clicking it turns it on without affecting anything else.
- Turned off checkbox: clicking it turns it on without affecting anything else.
At that point it was merely a question of setting it up so that if you tried to turn off the last option, another one would turn on kind of like squeezing a blob of mercury that would squirt out to the top or bottom- something that would make people go 'Hey, it is making one option stay on!' without causing them to make up weird rules like you had to use one of the top two options, or something.Interface is _interesting_, and Kaa has summed up 'intuitive' wonderfully with this simple guideline. It's not really necessary for the first try to work if the person can guess what the feature is for, and how it functions.
For a wild eye-opener on this try reading Tog on an old Apple ][ interface issue- how do you get the user to tell you if they are using a color or monochrome monitor? This was the toughest problem they hit! Yes, the answer was a variation on 'display, in different colors, the question "Are these words on the screen being shown in color?"' Hint: monochrome monitors were often green or amber screens- and green is a color ;)
Wheee, interface!
Firstly, your mistake was in using your credit card to buy an add-on for a product you do not own. Microsoft took to tracking those things once UCITA let them, and their self-help systems were typically Microsoftian in their vengeance against software piracy. They shut themselves down until you can satisfy MS that you're no pirate. (There is no due process as this is not government, but business). Once you call the nice antipiracy people and explain, they will undo the shutting-down of your systems. The reason for their doing so was suspected fraud. This reason was openly listed as the latest user-vendor transaction in your account with MS' payment processing people, who share information with many other businesses.
Said other businesses, such as your vendors, enjoy a much more rapid defense against deadbeat clients than they used to. They have an automatic response to the suspicion of fraud or bankruptcy. They are comparatively enlightened, as they are only killing 10 net 30 terms on the warning, and will still sell to you for cash up front. Your cashflow is considered _your_ problem. After only 3 more transactions you can get 10 net 30 financing back again, but for now every vendor you have is reading the same 'suspected fraud' report and being prudent.
Meanwhile, the credit card company has a process going itself. If more than 50% of the businesses you maintain ongoing relationships with downgrade your account level over a period of 48 hours, the credit card company will freeze your card until you call them from your work phone and reassure them that there's a good reason for this downgrading. This is for their protection in the event of a customer running amok and committing massive fraud and disappearing.
Assuming you remember all this from the fine print where it was hidden, your task is clear: leave the car where it's stranded, and walk across town to your store, where you must break in to use the phone to get your credit card turned back on to start dealing with these other issues.
On the bright side, your security system has shut itself off on suspicion you're a software pirate, so when you get to your store, the windows are already broken! Here's hoping the looters didn't take the phone. ;P ;)
So I feel like I'm held hostage, and don't feel safe doing anything but borrowing the use of a friend's credit card (and prepaying him) to update the registration online in the most unsurprising and normal manner possible- because I think that if I do _anything_ unexpected, I'm probably hosed. For one, I don't think I can pay them any other way anymore. And if I expect them to _do_ anything they'll probably get it wrong.
If anybody has experience in successfully moving their domain name from NS please chime in here, as I don't feel I have a choice, and some horror stories I've heard seem like too much of a risk to take.
I have had to _scan_ _paper_ to get a graphic out of a Publisher document. Thankfully, I was able to get hold of a nicer version of the graphic I was trying to extract- still, it's a rather damning indictment. MS File Formats: once they check in they _don't_ check out! ;)
Microsoft could intentionally take a piece of software I wrote, use it in some improper manner or figure out some way that my program can be made to fail on their machines, and then SUE ME FOR DAMAGES???
Ack!!! Stallman is right. This is a very serious problem! It's not even a question of whether joe blow could sue me if he wanted to- this apparently gives blanket permission for anyone or anyTHING, up to and including MS, to sue free software developers anytime they feel 'damaged'! It's a weapon, plain and simple.
At least things aren't going to change much if you are already resigned to being a _criminal_... in fact this makes the definition of 'criminal' potentially ridiculous and not commonsense at all. Instead of "What was your crime?" "I reverse engineered somebody's program" which is vaguely criminal-seeming, it could be "I wrote a text editor and gave it away for free and Microsoft deployed it on 600 desktops and upgraded a dll and my text editor broke so they are suing me for $50,000 in damages." To which the average person would say, "Huh??"
This is _messed_ _up_. When you read RMS on the matter, don't think solely in terms of end-users, individuals, potentially being able to sue free software authors and win. The worse problem is that it makes it possible for a Microsoft to set up a situation where somebody's software breaks in well-documented and accounted-for circumstances, then take that information and sue the developer under UCITA, obliterating them. Yes, this would be both cynical and blatantly using the legal system as a game and a weapon. Yes, it'd be unprecedented evilness. But lord, would it be effective and profitable to just shut down anybody giving away software by creating situations where their stuff failed and 'caused harm' and then suing.
Ack! This is almost too messed up to imagine. I have to wonder if the legal system itself, juries, judges would rebel at following through on the implications of all this. Surely in order to act on legislation of such evilness, human beings have to be convinced that it is in fact both 'the law' and just? There might be cases of "Your honor, in accordance with UCITA we find the defendant Guilty, as we were directed to do. We fine him One Cent..."
That's not a blanket protection against the horrors of incarceration, but neither is it a reason to live in terror of 'being made an example'. Face it: when it comes right down to it, right and wrong are not solely dictated by the government. They are tricky concepts, but it's like trial by jury- the average person will tend to have an opinion, a sense of right and wrong. When this sharply differs from what the government (or, these days, a corporation) dictates, there's an inequity that won't be simply legislated away, and you start getting more scofflaws and in the end, reform or revolution such as the United States did long ago.
Welcome to the 21st century: maybe it's time to reach out and take some of those rights back.
There are more important things than your determination to get things to trade. You're terribly stuck on the concept that you _must_ slug it out with corporations on their terms. I respect your sincerity and the clarity of your vision within the expectations of the proprietary world, but I disagree that this is relevant to the open source approach.
Us open-source-type-people are legion, many of us are clever, many of us are profoundly dedicated people who have a right to their own priorities. You ask a Richard Stallman what to do about the patent situation, and you won't find him thinking about what he can get to trade for the IP of others- he will be thinking about freedom, and damn everything else. I share that viewpoint, and I can cope if you think it doesn't make sense. From where I sit, your viewpoint doesn't make sense, as your concessions to extract IP from unwilling corporations are likely to just make everything worse. I see OSS patent portfolios as _negative_ value, locking up ideas that could be free in the _hopes_ of exchanging them with corporations that have no reason to come to the bargaining table in the first place.
Further, even if the patent lawyers offer their services for free, it's still going to cost the earth to do what you suggest, and who will choose the patents to be applied for? Smart patents can be blithely ignored, stupid patents are exactly the problem, and the whole process is hardly run at Internet speeds. It's too broken to get any benefit out of participating in.
Our best hope for OSS might simply be the model of DeCSS: we're legion, we're online, the information we need can be everywhere in seconds. There _is_ no Central Hacker to be imprisoned- just legions of geeks and script kiddies who are becoming increasingly politicized. Explain why exactly we would need to further the problem in order to crosslicense software patents which we could just use anyhow? When everything becomes a crime, everyone is automatically criminals anyhow, so who cares if somebody's patented 'the one click'?
Yes, I know: 'corporations cannot use Open Source if it is renegade and intentionally in violation of patent law!' Well... sucks to be them. And maybe it _should_ suck to be them. That's all I have to say about their plight, wanting to use free software but still lock up huge areas of idea and invention for themselves.
Meanwhile, using public disclosure as a sort of 'GPL for inventions', everybody, including the corporations, gets to use many new innovations. This is actually more generous than you're willing to be, and ought to soften the blow of the whole OSS movement gradually losing all respect for software patents (or any patents!) and beginning to just go on, using whatever they like, patented or not.
My viewpoint may well be far more radical than you are comfortable with, but I would say that at least it is more consistent than you suggest. It's just that I consider open rebellion, revolution, intentionally being an outlaw, a valid response to a situation that is completely untenable. You... don't. I respect your desire to work within the system, but I am less and less convinced that it's a good thing to do.
How does the community get access to existing closed source? Mostly, it doesn't. It's the same here. Write off the stuff that's already been patented. Consider it earth that has been scorched. There will never be an incentive sufficient to get these things released to society. They are mines in the earth that will still be harming people years from now.
We don't have a tool, immediate or otherwise, to fight any of these patents, best or worst. There is no way to arm the community in this regard. Creating more patents is just making bait for somebody to come along and _buy_ _out_ whatever holds the patents, or if it's the FSF, reduce it to pennilessness through harassing, frivolous lawsuits. You _can't_ win this game. You can't. The way it's set out there _is_ no way to win.
That's why I advocate totally refusing to play in the first place. Formally disclosing things _only_ accomplishes the goal of blocking patents. Properly done it makes derivative works more difficult to patent, because a sort of prior art would exist and the patent office would be aware of it for a change. It does not deny access to the large corporations because you _can't_: they are lawless, you can't restrain them with law. But you can block their ability to abuse the law by getting in there first in such a way that they won't fight you. It's like judo, and nothing else will work.
As for open disclosure being a one way street: I see no other way to make things permanently available to the community. It is the _only_ way to be sure things remain publically available. Again, attempting to out-power multinational corporations by starting a pathetic little software patent pool is ludicrous, and the most likely outcome is that you spend all your money on this expensive process only to be ignored. If somebody wants one of the patents, they need only read up on it, sue you until you, the FSF, or whatever hopelessly naive organization takes on this burden is utterly broke, and then go use the idea anyhow. Alternately, if the organisation isn't the FSF- buy it!
The _only_ thing that can be done is to start putting things out there. There is _no_ way to wrestle Alcoa or Beatrice or Bell Labs or IBM or Microsoft into releasing their intellectual property. They are presiding over the collapse of capitalism and need that property in order to use the law to make themselves the undisputed owners of their markets. You can't stop them. All you can do is turn to detailed and determined disclosure, which is cheaper, and which _does_ block further patent applications. That's what the process is FOR! That's why it exists in the first place! You have to pay to do it, but something like the FSF could easily afford to take that on, unlike patenting. Once you have done it, the patent office itself becomes your ally and it, not you, defends against further patenting. The whole _mechanism_ is _designed_ to let a company stake out an area so that there's obvious prior art. I am sure that is the first place the patent office looks when looking for prior art. I think it might be the _only_ place they look...
This doesn't justify Amazon, however: Amazon doesn't want a free market either. They, too, want to be in a position where there's no choice anymore. Unlike B&N, rather than seize control of the distribution channels, they are trying to seize control of e-commerce intellectual property. That's just as bad, only in a totally different sphere.
If you think this is all about ability to compete, you're out of your mind. It's yet another example of corporate leverage, and it's yet another way that people in general are losing choice, losing a free market, and approaching a sort of balkanized Communism in which the only access to goods is not through the government, but through particular companies which entirely control the market sectors they serve.
So, the vast anticompetitive practice you're missing is the ability to take and hold a vertical monopoly, seizing the means of distribution much as trusts bought up railroads long ago. Whether or not you consider it shady, it certainly is not free-market, and I suggest that it is no longer capitalism.
I don't love Amazon. I'm not supporting them. But I don't love B&N either, and agree that they are out to stifle Amazon along with all the little booksellers and everything else. It's Wal-Mart all over again, it's Microsoft all over again, whichever way you turn. :P
And Amazon has never had the slightest interest in helping my friend with the bookstore, either. They only want to be the ones doing the stifling, and as a twist they want to stifle the Internet, not just book-selling.
This, not 'a patent pool', is what people should be working towards. In order for it to actually benefit society, there needs to be a mechanism (ideally an Internet one) where people can submit ideas and inventions, have them filed as public disclosure (perhaps at the FSF's expense, or whoever wants to fund the relatively cheap process), and make them easily searchable not only by rich corporations but also by individuals.
Doing this would empower people to innovate and invent things, knowing that if they were good at it, not only would their ideas be protected from hostile patent attacks (by which I mean a company going and patenting the thing and then later filing a suit claiming original ownership), but they would be able to build a reputation as an innovative, inventive person: something which, as a service, is more valuable than simply the products of the invention process. This requires not only formal disclosure but _public_ disclosure: not only the resource for filing things with the patent office, but also the access to the public, the interest level of 'Oh look- an open inventions site! Let's go dig through the piles of stuff and see what's there!'.
Given sufficiently brilliant work available at such a site, there would be several results, all beneficial:
- Multiple companies would pounce on particularly good ideas and begin making them realities- but would be compelled to compete on price and quality rather than exclusivity, thus propping up the sagging freemarket economy
- Individuals could build small business on the same stuff, needing only an ability to market on a local level or produce a variation on the theme that is too specialised for the big company
- Consumers could choose among any of these sources for the resulting products, including the option to go do it themselves with full access to the general information about the thing
- Inventors of something good enough to produce all this activity would be newsworthy by virtue of the unusual approach to invention ownership: plus, the site itself would track popularity of its pages and contributors. Quickly, a gift economy would develop as described by ESR in his writings- with status directly mapping to a degree of fame and influence unavailable to inventors laboring in seclusion in corporate anonymity.
- As a result of that, the most talented inventors would be as in demand as top programmers and sysadmins: not by virtue of intellectual property they owned, but by virtue of their capacity to produce innovations and inventions. This could be treated either as the traditional "I see you can do this, so please develop something exclusively for me to patent for $BIGNUM", or in a more FSF-y way of "I see you can do this, so please develop something that I get to see first for $MEDIUMNUM, at which point you can publically disclose it and I'll have a headstart on running with it, plus I get to tailor it to my needs from the outset".
Please, no more talk of open source patent pools. There's a much better way.One example: there's a local record store I've always frequented. The owner is a personal friend. I've been looking for specific records there for _years_. When one shows up, it can be $50, for instance Steve Vai's out-of-print original pressing of 'Flex-able'. That's the way things used to be. Now, I can look on eBay and within five minutes find every last record I ever searched for, usually for something like $8. What am I supposed to do? What is my friend supposed to do?
Jeff could be exactly right that Amazon is small business compared to his heavy corporate competitors. Unfortunately, if that is true I don't see how he can survive any better than the local small business is. Amazon tends to run more expensive than competing online booksellers, and still loses money. That's not good.
It seems that long ago, we needed corporations because their efficiencies allowed them to bring certain things to the consumer which otherwise would be totally nonexistent in a village economy. Well, now that the 'global village' economy is actually happening, 'bringing things' to the consumer is a nonissue: the awareness is a mouse click away, and shipping is just a matter of mail or UPS or FedEx. In this new context, the corporations are no longer the means of bringing stuff to isolated, poorly-resourced consumers. At this point they're basically using the same resources and fluidity the consumer now has, to fight amongst themselves. Those which try to hold the moral high ground are likely to be obliterated.
The trouble is, the end result is not success, or wealth, or consumer wellbeing. The end result of this fighting is basically the obliteration of all small business (_everybody_ shall be a consumer and work at Wal-Mart. On the bright side, Wal Mart pays much better than it used to!) and indeed the obliteration of a lot of big business. It shouldn't be surprising that this isn't a healthy development. It's cancerous.
Patents have become simply the method for scorching the earth so that, once all business but a few winners is obliterated, no new business can ever grow again. It's really irrelevant what role patents play for battling companies, because their very battling has been taken to unhealthy and unproductive extremes, and is not justifiable behavior- it's societal suicide to encourage it, but it's positively trendy now. The role of patents in this new context is solely to scorch the earth and prevent new business from arising.
I suspect Jeff Bezos is right that he must either scorch the earth and prevent new business from happening, or see his own business stumble and fail. Where he goes wrong is in behaving like this illustrates a healthy economy and society. I refuse to sanction his scorching the earth and killing the future, just to save himself in a present where he's trying to survive in a damn slaughterhouse- particularly since survival for Amazon (still losing money rather than making it) means establishing itself as the _only_ choice for online bookbuying. It can't carry on like that unless it can convince Wall Street that it _will_ scorch the earth. Some of us aren't okay with the idea of only Amazon getting to play...
There's a naval aviation anecdote that fits, here. A pilot began shouting over the radio, "I've got a MiG at zero! I've got a MiG at zero!" meaning that he had an enemy plane behind him, shooting at him, and was unable to shake the attacker. Another pilot, exasperated, cut in, with "Shut up and die like an aviator."
Jeff, shut up and die like an aviator!
Though actually I got the term from a Stewart Brand book on the MIT Media Lab. The idea is that as a speaker goes beyond his actual research and begins talking to try to sway people and overreaching himself, he begins waving his hands and talking louder and going "Obviously this is the next paradigm for interface design!" and all that rot. Handwaving is when you can't back it up with real data, real benefits or real examples. It's empty argument, best done with Lots Of Big Words, best kept as general as possible so nobody can call you on factual errors. You gloss over implementation and realities and try to build the biggest concept you can without quite defining it, really. David Gelernter is the best handwaver I have ever seen in my life, and I will never forget his book "Mirror Worlds". However, about the only useful idea I found in it was an idea that generalises to being able to keep an eye on say, 307200 processes at a glance by colorcoding them and assigning each a pixel on a 640x480 display. This, of course, assumes you're only watching for 'danger signs' like a red pixel in a sea of dim green, or that you are looking for physical relationships like a cluster of a particular color that should be more diffuse and scattered (i.e. if the values need to be varied, you could spot a localised area of solid color as it built up).
Even here, the book handwaved off in a useless direction, suggesting physical levers _lifting_ the colored dot up out of the field of background values, and totally failing to come up with applications. Such applications might be watching a display of users with red signifying a request for assistance and the red increasing with time-on-hold, or for the localised area case it might be the modelling of a polyglot city's acts of violence, in which you would be monitoring gang violence by seeing if there was a pattern to the acts committed in a given geographical area. If a particular type of act became very localised, you would know that you had a gang laying claim to an area, and could see the area visually, with the outskirts represented by a diffuse area of the color.
Gelernter didn't even bother coming up with decent examples like that. He was too busy handwaving to think of the implications of any of the ideas he put out there, and the final chapter of his book was a fairly artistic parable that served as the complete and total disclaimer of any consequences deriving from his work.
I didn't like his book.