The trouble is, the GPL does not use copyright against itself. It uses copyright for its own interests (which is quite in line with what copyright is for), and it uses the low barriers of entry for copyright to make it easier to propagate its interests.
It is too costly to try and use patents similarly, and it's not an analogous case (which is why you sense it isn't as elegant). Instead of advocating a free method of permanently making works free to all who will treat them a certain way, you are advocating a staggeringly expensive method of confining works within restrictions that can only be overcome through agreements. Your end result is not a large body of work that is copyright a particular way, it is a large body of work with significant legal entanglements for the industry, easily abused by people in moments of annoyance or through prejudice.
It's sort of like this. The GPL does not concern itself with the motives of its users, only with their interaction with itself. A developer can be the most proprietary, patent-seizing bugger in the world, but he can still use GPLed work all he likes as long as he upholds its requirements. Now, in this patent proposal, how many people are advocating that the portfolio be used as a weapon and withheld from all those who will not share their patents with us? How many people want the portfolio withheld from Microsoft, from Unisys, from other 'enemies'? Isn't the whole point of a patent portfolio to selectively withhold it from others in order to make them do what you want?
This is the key difference between an opensource patent portfolio and the GPL, and why I adamantly oppose the accumulating of any such portfolio. GPLed works are available by default, and only your refusal to comply with the terms denies you access to them. Patents are unavailable by default, and only coming to an agreement with the patent holder entitles you to them. Even without the cost, even without the many people wanting to punish others in the industry, I still could not tolerate this proposal, because it does not diminish the problem of patents at all. It only furthers it and brings new levels of politicking and trouble to the OSS community.
What I would like to see, instead, is a glaringly public Open Concepts website, not just for software developers but for general inventors to use. At this site you could write up everything you've invented, and have it hosted somewhere searchable where people can get at it, where the patent office can do searches through it, where it's out in the open. Such publication would be effectively public domain (or it could specifically be made public domain), so a good idea could be instantly seized on by individuals _and_ the monstro-corps- the distinction is that, if an idea is listed on this hypothetical site, it is a case of prior art and blocks any patents from being filed along those lines.
THAT is what I see as a useful reaction to patent hell. How do you expect to deal with chokingly restrictive intellectual property issues by making more of them? The only way is to establish a place, a method, where people can choose of their own free will to cooperate instead of hoard. Then, you have to make that method a block against other people abusing this freedom- with the GPL, this is done by copyright, and requiring the license to be propagated, and in so doing, you prevent someone from grabbing all the code and making it proprietary again. With this public domain site proposal, this is again done by using the rules against themselves- in this case, rather than having code being made proprietary, the behavior you want to block is of somebody taking the ideas and patenting them. By making the ideas formally public (in the scientific tradition, BTW), you are blocking anyone's ability to go and patent those ideas, yet as with the GPL, they are free to _use_ them as long as it's within the accepted restrictions. For the GPL, that means you can never un-GPL the thing as a third party and remove people's access to it. For this proposed PD storehouse, it means you can never patent an idea taken from the storehouse, and remove people's access to it.
I'm sorry, but your patent-portfolio entirely depends on arbitrarily removing people's access to it. I realise that many people feel removing the access for 'bad people' is a good thing, but I can't agree with that, and I strongly suggest that it will not have the results you want from it.
No, you are quite wrong. The United States is a republic, not a democracy- and that is not by accident or mistake.
There's a level of inefficiency built into the system specifically to avoid straight-up vote over issues, and specifically to avoid democracy. Think for a second about what you are suggesting. Consider what votes you'd get for the following issues:
What is the official American OS? (Windows/Mac/Linux/Be)
How much taxes should people pay? (twice as much as now/same as now/nobody should pay any taxes)
Should Microsoft be allowed to innovate and help consumers by standardizing the world on its products? (Yes, they have that right/No, they should not be allowed to help consumers if it hurts Sun)
Beginning to get the picture? Direct democracy is basically an open invitation to pure Politics As Spin, and it is very likely that you'd be the first against the wall, you slashdot reader hacker criminal type you;)
The problem is, it's well accepted that larger factions _will_ stomp all over smaller factions given the slightest opportunity. That's the way it's always been, and certainly watching the tech industry does _not_ suggest that this tendency has changed with the increase in technology we've seen.
The question you need to ask is, exactly how do you keep all littler factions from being taken out and shot? That's basically what happens as soon as you start attempting to use pure democracy. For instance, in pure democracy applied to the computer industry, this very website is grossly undeserving of any support or 'mindshare'. It isn't about windows- it wastes huge amounts of resources, periodically slashdots other sites and eats bandwidth and offers _nothing_ to support Windows, which clearly has the numbers. Now, if Windows users mostly _want_ Slashdot that would be a different story, but under direct democracy there is no room for the concept of 'Loyal Opposition' much less underground or radical factions. It's a powerful homogenizing force that only begins to really kick in when people sense that they have the power to use this 'direct democracy'.
It's not merely the 'Bread And Circuses' problem, it is worse because you get factions seemingly 'competing' in much the same way that the largely unregulated computer industry has been 'competing': playing dirty as hell, and winner-take-all. If you think having the RIAA and MPAA around treading on your rights is a problem, imagine what happens when The People get to vote on these issues! These associations have media resources that would blow your mind, and sure as 'hacker' is spun to sound like a terrorist, you'll get the issues presented in such a way that Orwell would drill through his grave, and The People will cheerfully vote to have to taken out and shot if you reverse engineer software programs. Hell, I could see _programming_ _itself_ made illegal for the unlicensed, given the right spin- such as these DOS attacks, or some credit-card-oriented spin.
You don't know how lucky you are to live in a system where any particular faction is basically tied up in red tape. If you want to see what direct democracy looks like, look at Microsoft in the tech industry, and imagine them without the DoJ or any government. The trouble is you can't expect people to take an interest in everything: at least the representatives can be expected to read 4000 page bills and the like, as that is their job. You cannot expect the general public to read 4000 page bills before voting on them, so the vote becomes pure armwrestling over how things are phrased and spun. That's not really democracy because people are being fooled...
I have a hunch that they would actually _like_ to be sued over this. In a few years when the antitrust case has had an effect, they might feel differently, but right now, Microsoft has fabricated evidence in open court, done their level best to con the judge and the whole legal system- maybe I am reading too much into this, but the impression I get is that they honestly believe there's no such thing as reality or truth at this point. Reality for them _is_ what people can be made to believe. As such, since they have 'won' in the court case by introducing totally made-up stuff and haven't been called on it yet, I think they may want another court case to do it in. Couldn't you see them seeking ever more impressive forums to introduce made-up stuff in? It's their hope that their credibility is greater than Sun or Linux advocates or even the justice system of the USA. If so, every challenge is a further public relations opportunity.
The trouble is, this approach is based on seeing themselves as everyman's favorite success story, the plucky little company with everyone's best interests at heart. They need a _lot_ of goodwill to get away with a mudslinging contest with reputable names in the industry, much less with the justice system (many people would _like_ to believe the courts are fair- not kangaroo courts only out to beat up poor MS). Many MS people do believe that they have that goodwill, in the same way that many Nixon people believed he had the support of the country through Watergate. But that goodwill isn't there- it's been eroded through abuse, and the fatal arrogance of MS is not in making such bold challenges to industry leaders and the law, but in trusting that public opinion remains on their side through it all. It does not.
Not exactly. The difference is in the recording technology itself- 44.1/16 is simply not adequate though it _is_ possible to do heavy postprocessing to synthesize what the wave might have been- this is what kilobuck D/A converters like the Wadia do, and can make quite a difference.
The difference is _also_ in the pre/post stages, for instance it doesn't matter how nice your data is if you just run it through J. Random Op-Amp. It's very very common to find extremely crap parts in these supposedly perfect digital devices, and this limits them unfairly. Rotten cheap little op-amps, pathetic coupling caps to save costs- I've bought a _recording_ deck of fairly high end pretensions, an Alesis LX-20 ADAT, and while it does 24 bit recording, and while digital is in theory quite capable of dealing with bass _very_ nicely indeed, this recorder nevertheless has pathetic 47uf coupling caps on the channel outs. This says that they designed to be 3db down at maybe 30hz- they designed out the capacity for clean accurate subsonic information that digital HAS. I'll be rewiring it, probably with 100uf which will at least take the low end down closer to 10hz or so. This will also clean up boominess in the low bass, as when you near such a cutoff you end up getting a certain amount of accentuation- a unit with 47uf cutoffs might 'thunder' pretty impressively but lowering the cutoff frequency produces a cleaner and more responsive sound in those frequency ranges, less muddy. Translates in sonic terms to a touch less sub-bass but going deeper, bass that is markedly clearer and less prone to get in the way of other musical information.
So essentially it's _both_. Yes, digital audio at CD levels is substantially lacking, but on the other hand most of the equipment makes it sound even worse than it is. I'm a rock guy, not really a classical music person, and I know that I've been able to get rid of a _lot_ of the 'polite, sterile, thin' qualities of digital audio by just treating the players and recorders like they were instruments, and tweaking things like the highs. To some extent you really can give the hardware itself more life and energy by letting the digital outputs come through the analog opamps and circuitry as unimpeded as possible. This does also include allowing the noise floor to have normal op-amp noise, transistor hiss. It's not even intrusive, but attempts to completely obliterate this normal circuit noise inevitably also take a major toll on the music.
You start running into _serious_ problems when you treat the band as strictly what the human ear can pick up. Apart from the fact that subsonics are picked up by the inner ear and supersonics can be sensed though not heard through bone conduction, the trouble is that you get cancellation effects and distortions depending on how you roll off the extremes of the band. This is a nightmarish problem for CD audio, as it must put a _really_ steep filter above 22K if not still lower- a brick wall filter that is about as bad as you can get for causing interactions with lower frequencies. Personally, I prefer to start rolling off a lot lower but a lot more smoothly, but that's just me.
As for the sawtooth, I'm afraid that's the reality. Look, if you take the input signal a bit higher, you start getting a subharmonic through the sampling which can be almost as loud as the sampled frequency! You surely are not suggesting that nearly 100% additive distortion is perfect reconstruction? Try sampling a 44.09 wave at 44.1, obviously you get nothing but the subharmonic. Now try sampling a _22.045_ wave, which technically is supposed to be within the band. Begin to see the problem? The same subharmonic distortions are still affecting you, even within the band. For fun, consider how this affects (less and less) frequencies at 11.0225, 5.51125, and 2.755625K. Each time you're basically halving the distortion- so the interference goes from about 100% at 44.09K to 50% to 25% to 12.5% to 6.25% interference at 2.755625K. But wait, a tone at 2K should be perfect! No, more like a tone at _2.75625K_ (note 756 instead of 7556) will be entirely free of subharmonic distortion sampled at 44.1K, and a tone at 2.755625 is a pathological worst case for that sampling rate w.r.t subharmonic distortions. So be sure not to let your musicians play that frequency;)
If you think I'm making this up you should study harder. _Everything_ has its limits, and digital recording is interesting because with it, you can really rigorously quantify exactly what and where the limits are. The ones who told you it was perfect reconstruction were not scientists, they were corporate marketers attempting to replace the LP in popular media with the CD. Sure worked, didn't it? Even got many people believing the mathematically, provably wrong claims of no distortion. To me, _SIX!_ percent subharmonic interference in a pathological worst case frequency at a mere 2K or so is pretty damn distorted, frankly. Don't know about you. Maybe I just try harder to overcome this stuff rather than wishing it away...
People always focus on the tiny detail, as if the important thing with analog was to retrieve detail that is below the digital noise floor. This is a losing game. Analog noise ends up being just as bad.
What _isn't_ usually noticed (surprisingly) is the more logical purpose for those huge cables and absurd slew rates and amperage levels- the _big_ transients. Get a whole horn section to raise the hairs on the back of your neck with a FFF line- or for that matter get the whole orchestra going, or for that matter early Who, with those incredibly strong saturated compressed vocals (very 'tubey' sounding) and LOUD guitars and LOUD drums. You'll have loads of transients stuffed into the music that go way beyond what you can pack into 'polite' digital playback at 44.1/16, especially when the digital equipment designers continue screwing it up by anally plastering HF-rolloff capacitors all over everything to eat the tiny negligible hiss that the transistors and analog opamps produce.
When put onto a record, these naturally stress the cutting lathe, but that's why cutting lathes went from 100 to 500 to kilowatt amplifiers that fed off 440 volt lines etc ad nauseam. When placed on a record surface, these are not tiny dustlike details that get scrubbed off with the first play. They are fscking big walls of material that tend to fling the needle physically into the next groove and cause skips. When they don't, you get vinyl playback that has the kind of energy and aggression and life that LPophiles talk about.
A realworld example sure to appeal to CmdrTaco's heart: The Who's album Live At Leeds was released with a label that said in big scrawly letters, "CRACKLING NOISES OK- DO NOT CORRECT". When played on a high end turntable, do you in fact get crackly noises? No, you get the Who, live. It's the same as orchestral recordings breaking up at FFF and fancy cartridges that don't break up at those modulation levels.
Obviously, no matter how abused the LPs get, you continue to have those energy peaks undiminished. They outlast all the other sounds, and they are exactly what you don't get with current digital media- hence the audiophiles. This provides us sound engineer types a very interesting and exciting challenge. How do we translate this into the digital domain? I've found that multiband compression and physically modifiying the digital recorders to be the best bet. In particular, it's impossible to both get most of the energy and also suppress all the noise of the analog parts. You have to treat the circuits as if they were high end analog circuits even if the opamps are kind of cheap, and get rid of 'total hiss elimination' caps. Often this gives you the proper presentation, and in the cases where things become too bright and edgy, inductive resistance (easily got by those digital noise filters- ferrite chokes, in other words) is a hell of a lot better for the sound than ringy little ceramic chips to ground.
Hardly. The thing about Katz is that he is a straight up _TV_ journalist. That's his background. He wants very badly to repudiate this history, and has said as much in his comments- you don't have to read between the lines to see that he views his past of being a TV Executive Producer with loathing. However, it colors his writing style a great deal.
Katz writes:
to a general audience
to an _uneducated_ general audience, one that is not necessarily intelligent
sound bites, which are compressed 'Reader's Digest' style ideas simplified for the masses
repetitively, to restate the sound bites often enough that even the dumbest viewer will hear them
without opinion- at least in theory. This is very characteristic of TV journalism. "Whether or not these brave geeks will change the world remains to be seen. One thing is certain- time will tell." TV journalism often pointedly avoids expressing opinion.
None of this implies Jon Katz is intentionally talking down to Slashdot, or mocking us, or treating us like idiots. He is genuinely trying to communicate- the way he learned how. It gets messier when his hysteria and passionate opinions butt heads with the learned need to suppress opinion, and it is then that he behaves like the worst of TV journalism- producing dumbed down hysterical screeds under a cloak of impartiality.
It would be better for Jon to learn that this _is_ a new world, and that the rules are different. It's not relevant for him to try so hard to appear like he's not expressing an opinion- that is for TV anchorpeople to do- in the role of web journalist iconoclast, it is more appropriate for Jon to claim his biases out front and express them openly.
He does indeed connect the geek world to mainstream society- and indeed to mainstream media. I wish he would just _accept_ that this is his role- he is awfully prone to enjoy being called up by ABC, BBC and the Associated Press (due to his credentials as former CBS executive producer- why else?), but he insists on being treated as an outlaw web journalist by his peers, by us his Slashdot audience. It doesn't work that way- even before the full story of his position came out, people sensed that he seemed to be slumming, that he apparently was more privileged and was writing for Slashdot like it was some kind of game. That doesn't get you much street cred.
Yet, the reality is this- Jon has repudiated _most_ of the power and Big Media influence he once had, apparently because he got disgusted with it and decided to close the door on that part of his life. He only seems to be slumming- in reality, he's being a searcher, just like his running to the mountain book would suggest, and he _wants_ the street cred, wants a new role he can respect. He no longer wants to suck up to big media (despite appearances)- it's us he wants to be accepted by, but his habits and learned methods are so Big Media that it all comes off wrong and he fails to click with his desired audience. (trust me on this- _everything_ he's ever done that's self-aggrandizing is What One Does if you play the media game well- not doing it is being a media _luser_- Katz is _no_ media luser, he's a BMediaKingpinFH)
Recognizing this, he has no choice but to try to behave like the people abusing him are just ill-behaved children acting out. He doesn't _want_ to go running back to CBS or wherever, and be a TV producer again. He apparently _hated_ that. He _wants_ to find not just a role here, but a community that accepts him. Look at how much he talks about community, how often he swears that he _is_ supported by a vast community in email, that they are the _real_ geeks, not his critics. And it's his own past working against him- his own habits that trip him up and set him against the interests of most slashdot geeks.
It's a tough position Jon Katz is in. If he was to quit with the sound bites, stop writing to general audiences, not answer when called by ABC and BBC and AP, he would gain little and throw away most of the advantages he _does_ have. Yet he seems unwilling to accept these advantages for what they are- he is shamed by them, it seems, he wants to be something much deeper than an ex-TV-producer with good connections and the knack of writing to general audiences.
Well, I'd say this to him: having finally learned enough about you to feel I at last understand you a little better, having tirelessly criticised you under my own name out in the open until I became one of the two names you cited as sort of 'braver flamers/critics', I think you should STAY- but you have _got_ to start using your advantages rightly. Be out-front about it! You're Slashdot's translator for general audiences. You're the guy whose number is called by big media when they want _your_ opinion. You, Jon, have the potential to be a bridge, and rather than turn against all the things you learned in your 'other life', you should embrace them- because they are setting the tone for your writing anyhow, you can't avoid that. You _do_ write sound bites, so write good ones. You _do_ write to an uneducated general audience which doesn't even read Slashdot- so do that and do it well and count on people outside the Slashdot norm coming to see what the fuss is about and finding your articles the only ones that speak to them, that translate and explain what they are seeing. You _do_ have connections: normal people don't just get hired by Wired and Rolling Stone and called up by big media reps (Wired and RS stringers certainly don't get the Beeb asking them what the latest media merger means!). Use those connections. When they ask about geek/techie things, be able to answer them. When big media needs to see a certain side of things (i.e. DeCSS), hint off the record that they need to cover things a certain way or they will appear the tools of corporate influence. You _know_ how to do this stuff.
"why are the authors conspicuously absent from the public forums?"
They aren't. I am a Slashdot author, and I'm conspicuously present in the public forums. I did the Borgification and Interface article. I have every intention of doing another, heartily encouraged by at least Roblimo who posted the last one- when I have something well-developed enough to say that I'm ready to spend some days writing it, just as if it was for print.
I tend to run long but not, I think, repetitively- basically the only time I feel I have an article is when I have a _lot_ of ground to cover. I disagree strongly with some of Katz's writing principles- I figure, if you are not quite sure you are right, why are you writing anything at all? The world has a way of _editing_ your rightness- unless you are truly pigheaded there's no reason to be wishywashy and pretend you don't have an opinion. If you are off base you _will_ be corrected, and at that point your notion of what is completely right will change. Rightness is not really a destination, it's more of a process- it is time based. I took pains to time-stamp the argumentative essays on airwindows.com for just this reason. When I go back and look at my ideas later, some of them will be wrong in the new context.
I feel that to fully interact with a world that is both embracing and hostile, you have to have both humility and selfconfidence- not one or the other, _both_ in large amounts. I figure I do pretty well on those grounds, mostly because I have to. I believe Jon Katz is on the one hand lacking in humility (which is a _very_ easy and obvious criticism to make) but on the other hand, lacking in selfconfidence. This sets him up to try and pull rank and _assert_ a superiority he does not feel and isn't entitled to- which is a large part of why he's not slugging it out in the threads like writers like me.
I can only guess at the reasons for this, but I'd single out Jon's attempts to censor his past from himself- he doesn't honor all parts of his life. He was a very heavyweight media exec, the Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News, and this seems to have horrified him so much that he attempts to call this another, now disdained, life. It is as if that life is not part of him at all.
Unfortunately, you can't do that- I suppose Thomas Merton, Jon's Trappist monk, led a more sheltered life which did not contain elements of shame. This is why Jon would be drawn to him, but it wouldn't equip Merton to be able to teach Jon about coming to terms with all elements of his life- and so he hasn't, and this is a barrier preventing Jon from dealing with us on equal terms.
I realize that I am a _strange_ candidate for bringing further enlightenment, but on other hand I'm one of the two critics Jon named who post under their own names with their own emails handy. I too have had supportive email from intelligent people over this. In retrospect, I'm a little disappointed in myself that I didn't consider the idea that _Jon_ felt inadequate: I know perfectly well how this sort of thing works, and now we have all the clues (former big media job that was repudiated, shame over past 'lives', efforts to behave 'born again' to totally disclaim the former life and not accept it in the slightest way) to see that, as so often happens, Jon's seeming arrogance is compensation. It reads as arrogance, but comes from feelings of inadequacy. Beating on him frankly doesn't help alter this, it perpetuates it, and I'm not surprised Jon resents such beating though he can't articulate it in a way that will help to stop it.
I would suggest,
"Hey, I like you people but I'm not as geeky as you are. I have some stuff in my past, such as being a bigshot TV Executive Producer, that is supposedly something to be proud of but which I am actually ashamed of. I don't want to live like that anymore but I still have the connections I made from that time. How about I pull some strings to try and use this uncomfortable position I'm in, 'slumming' with people whom I actually respect more than the Big Media people, in a way that helps the community? I've done the bigshot thing and it sucked and I'm still trying to shake the habits of thought it taught me. I'm trying as best I can to be one of you, but when I get flamed I tend to puff up with fake ego and bombast, which doesn't help me sleep and also doesn't make anybody flame me less. I don't know how to stop reacting like this. Can I stick around anyhow, in hopes that I learn something?
I, for one, would not continue saying 'no' if that was the question. Jon, people desperately want to resolve the contradictions in your presence here, but they can't until you come to terms with the contradictions within yourself. I'm almost completely sure that a lot of this stems from the whole 'rejection of media trendy' thing you've done to yourself- completely rebelling against what had to be a major part of your life, and desperately searching for something to redeem it, make it like it never happened. How about instead asking if perhaps Slashdotters could accept these parts of you? I see no reason why that wouldn't happen. In effect, you have decided for yourself that being a bigshot executive producer was _so_ bad that nobody can possibly accept you unless you pretend it didn't happen. It would be much healthier and more effective if you quit trying to deny entire parts of your life, and got honest about them. You pontificate a bit much for a writer- but there's a harmony and appropriateness about your pontificating as a writer-ex-bigshot-TV-producer... a friendly one, one that really loves geek culture and wants to further it, help it. That is likeable, more likeable than an incongruously bombastic philosopher-writer...
Be who you are, and I know that many of _my_ objections to your presence, your writing, will tend to fade away. This is because of who _I_ am: I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I do tend to fixate on such incongruities and hammer them into the ground- it's my nature, I have a tough time letting go of such things. It looks to me now that there's a path for you to be in more harmony with Slashdot, but it requires you to quit trying to redefine yourself using Slashdot as a tool- and _accept_ yourself, including the bits that shame you, with slashdot as an environment.
For the first time in a long time I'm genuinely happy I don't filter you, because this is just the sort of insight I needed to get... I might actually start wanting to hear from you if you can grow in this way. The key point is that not being who you are is a barrier: you've been getting defensive, you fight it, you try to be superior to avoid having your barrier broken, avoid the "He's nothing but a 'tired TV producer'!", and in doing so you cut off any chance of real communication- which is your only hope of thriving in the new media, much less as a person among other people.
Be who you are. Slashdot will accept a writer/pontificator/ex-TV-producer. What it will not accept is somebody who insists on being So Much More than an ex-TV-producer. Your efforts to 'rise above' what is only part of your life are separating you from the people whose community you want to belong to...
Why would a person wanting to make a GPLed variation of a GPLed program need to approach anybody _carefully_? That's not right. I don't use the GPL to set up that kind of dynamic with other developers. I use it because it permanently establishes a situation where nobody _has_ to come to me hat in hand begging permission to use my code- they only need to follow the rules and keep the situation the way it is. They can annoy me, they can call my code crap, they can work for Microsoft- none of that matters, all that matters is that they have access conditional on their willingness to offer EXACTLY THE SAME DEAL! to others. NO! substitutions.
This is so, so wrong- just _listen_ to how it sounds. "Probably, maybe, other people can use this GPLed software, if they ask _nicely_ and he's not having a bad day- he probably doesn't have any reason to forbid their access to the GPLed software so it shouldn't be much of a problem..." I feel _ill_:P isn't this exactly what's supposed to never happen? I want to see this situation nipped in the bud, immediately. This is the license I use for my software and I gave no permission for it to be rewritten in this manner...
Probably not, but it's dead simple to monitor where the users go, and who's going to argue that the company shouldn't monitor the usage of these computers that they themselves supplied? Then it's simply a matter of the 'chilling effect' of wondering whether you can be fired from Ford because they know you read slashdot and fear you are a hacker:)
Not to mention, when Northwest Airlines can have employees' home computers searched and seized without due process even when the company did NOT provide the computers, how much easier would it be if the company _did_ provide the computers?
This becomes basically carte blanche for the company to legally search and seize everything you do, at work or at home. Legally you end up not having a private life since so much activity can be done and coordinated over a computer that the company actually provided. There's no way a present-day court would allow a citizen any rights under these circumstances. I mean, if you can get your computer seized when _you_ bought it, and impounded and searched, what possible excuse can you have for privacy and right to your own property when the _company_ buys the computer for you?
Jon, Jon, Jon. You really ought to read slashdot...
Actually, it's interesting in another way- since we have just learned that Jon was Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News, these calls take on a whole new meaning. Early in the morning, Jon gets a call from ABC, then the BBC, then an AP stringer? He may glibly say he was Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News in a 'previous life', but it appears the big media power centers still have his home phone number. Ever wonder why it was Katz getting called by ABC, the BBC, and AP, and not the editors of Slashdot, Rolling Stone or Wired? Now we know the answer.
So, in a way, though Jon's self-promotion has little to do with the story, it has everything to do with his presentation of the story and spoke volumes to anyone who was clued enough to think about it- unfortunately, nobody was. It's not that Jon _self-promotes_ and curries favor with these big media companies- if you or I tried to do that we'd fail laughably, if Rob Malda with all his new wealth tried to do it they'd laugh in his face. Jon attempted to con us into thinking he was some wandering outsider journalist, and it must have been fun and gratifying. The power centers of big media remember, and they lost no time in asking the former Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News what he thought about the merger.
I, too, thought Jon was mad for self-promotion, but in fact he's only acting out of habit and being unwilling to give up the power and privilege he apparently walked away from. He doesn't need Slashdot's help to get on the talk show circuit, to sell his book to Amazon. He didn't even need to fight to get on the Rolling Stone masthead, or on Wired. His past was his ticket, the key to open all those doors normally open only to talent and hard work.
That gives me the idea for the one question I'll formally ask...
What you probably didn't know about his background when you wrote this is that Jon is slumming, always has been. His background is that he was Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News. With cred like that it's not hard to arrange to write for Rolling Stone or Wired: name drop a bit, hint that you're tired of all that tedious power and pointyheaded bossness, and people will throw opportunities at you, hoping that you will introduce them to Dan Rather.
So, your question is misguided. Instead, one might ask how often Katz has to name-drop or remind people of the privilege and connections he has. What I would be very interested to know is, at what point did the Slashdot crew know Katz was 'in a previous life' (gah! Can we say pretentious?) the Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News? I know that until today I thought he was just a Wired hack writer who also had written for Rolling Stone, but I'll tell you, the Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News _does_ _not_ have trouble arranging interviews. Think about it a second. It's all about networking, who you know. Would _you_ be rude to a 'web journalist' whom you know actually has a history of being Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News? Who might he be rubbing elbows with, in his comfortable 'faux drop-out' stance? I flat guarantee that anybody who _does_ know would fall all over themselves to curry favor with him: and perhaps this is what happened to the Slashdot folks.
Look, I am also a worldwide-published writer who's got articles run on Slashdot, maybe you'll listen to me. It's not that Jon adheres to an older, slower-paced style in an age of 'sound bites'. The problem is, Jon writes _only_ sound bites, but he writes them over and over again, rephrasing them a little, and his articles at their worst are a _string_ of the same sound bite repeated different ways. This is not a style, this is inadequacy. If Jon was building to a point, even this would be acceptable, but he is very prone to blurt his whole thesis up front and then to repeat it over and over, finishing with "And what do you think, Slashdot readers?" which he will not read as he does not read Slashdot.
I'm afraid Jon _is_ in fact a Bad Writer, by almost any standard. He spells OK, though that might be Microsoft Word...
You see, the revolution has already started, but it's actually the 'geeks' whose heads will roll, and it is the people like Jon 'executive producer' Katz who will be doing the chopping. Yes, there will be much wailing and crashing of NTeeth (;) ) but the PHBs would rather die in control than survive only at the mercy of detested 'geeks'.
As for me, I'm unfortunately not socially acceptable enough to fit Jon's image. I have yet to see TPM, only saw the matrix when given a VHS tape of it as a present, and am as likely to enjoy Confucian Chinese culture (The Analects is pretty cool reading) as pop culture, if not more so. If I buy a magazine it's a geeky one- I consider Cinefex (EFX professional geeks) and Ultraflight (ultralight aircraft geeks) to be geeky. I'll devour these for information. I know a lot about many things but never mastered fun or recreation...
...and in some ways this is a type of geekiness, but in other ways it's something else: autism. I have Asperger's Syndrome, which has colored my life a huge amount. As such, I can't seriously think I speak for anybody in particular, much less 'geeks', and if Katz manages to make a whole pop subculture out of selfproclaimed 'geeks' to rule the world, I doubt it'd have anything to do with me, I doubt any of the new 'geeks' would have any sense that I was one of them.
And I am OK with this, because _they_ are the ones lining up for the guillotine: http://library.northernlight.com/PN200001132400001 25.html?cb=13&sc=0. Me, well maybe I am just some stupid autistic person who doesn't understand what it is to be properly human, but all this 'rule the world' stuff seems very stupid to me. What will you do with it once you rule it? Who will sanitize the telephones, or middle manage? At least you're led by a tired TV producer:)
Not to mention, why the assumption that there are no music creators other than those signed to industry labels? By this I mean, why can't you get blank tapes, blank CD-Roms etc. for recording YOUR OWN music and not pay a tax to the industry? That is effectively paying royalties to the RIAA for nothing and receiving nothing but emptier pockets and the knowledge that you've given your enemy even more money to crush you with.
Looking around I see: five blank CD-Rom media. Six blank audio cassettes. 12 S-VHS tapes destined for use in a spiffy ADAT. Can anybody give me a figure on exactly how much money I was forced to give to the RIAA for these media alone, none of which is to be used to copy their artists? Also, I am curious- artists use higher quality tapes for master recordings, and in fact the S-VHS is 'required' by my ADAT. Tell me, when I buy more high-quality media, am I taxed _more_ compared to crud tapes, or the same?
I think one reason is very simple- someone who's ended up 'unusual' in one way will be less prone to fall into usual patterns in other ways. In other words, if someone is straight because that's something one doesn't think about, they probably also (at this stage in history) use Windows exclusively on a PC, as that too is something one doesn't think about. (They may well have very strong opinions on trucks or cameras or skis, tho:) )
Frankly, sexual orientation has zilch to do with geekness, except that gay geeks comparatively don't get any either;) this is more significant of geekness than the actual orientation. It's like priority levels that constantly rate 'debugging this bit of questionable code' over 'going out and flirting or socializing or meeting people'. Naturally, the result is a general lack of sexual fireworks- though not necessarily the _capacity_ for fireworks (remark paid for by the Take-A-Geek-To-Bed Foundation)
As for me? I take pleasure in knowing that, while I am a Linux user and a Mac user and a CLI sympathiser who likes handling linux through xterms and a cordial KDE basher, on slashdot people don't even care or consider my sexual orientation- they are much more interesting in my Mac-ual orientation, or CLI-ual orientation, all the intellectual pursuits that seem much more _important_ than meatspace.
And this is good. It's only when well-meaning people inquire "Are there _any_ gay geeks?" (answer- why no, they're all hairdressers in Greenwich Village! _Everybody_ knows that thilly dahling) that I figure it's worth even mentioning. Oh, and I know of some pretty darn stereotypical (well, more like 'in your face') gay geeks who are also emphatically 'real' geeks. Again, there's no real correlation except for maybe people who are gay are somewhat more likely to also be geeks if they deal with computers. It's not the computers, it's a matter of people conforming to the norm or not. Geekness isn't the norm either.
I genuinely needed drugs to function when I was a teenager. Unfortunately this wasn't because they gave me anything- it was simply because I was so totally alienated, self-hating and unable to cope, that all the time I _wasn't_ on drugs I was hurting so bad that I couldn't function. When I did drugs (pot was the main one really, the anchor), I was able to get out of my own head, which was vital. Only then did I see things like a normal un-screwed-up person would. I didn't see it that way at the time, of course. I thought it was making me better.
Unfortunately, what happened to me is what happens to some people- it stopped working for me. It stopped buffering me from the increasingly horrible reality, but I kept getting more and more compulsive about it, and then I'd still be able to step back and look at myself and wonder, what the hell? I'd always put drugs into me like they were fuel, but I began questioning whether a life like that (in worse and worse surroundings) was even worth living.
Roughly around the point where I didn't give a damn anymore and would settle for anything as long as it was different, I quit using, also drinking alcohol. That hasn't changed though I'm somewhat older now. One funny thing- I ended up drinking coffee so intensely that I shook and couldn't think straight! So I ended up giving up coffee 'cos I couldn't use it like a normal person:) still consume caffeinated beverages, but only ones like Coke and black tea.
Last of all I gave up smoking (tobacco), again only when I was good and ready. Good and ready constituted having the flu, smoking anyway (of course;) ) and being rendered literally unable to breathe at times, in acute pain. I threw away big freezer bags full of tobacco (being a good hoarder I keep bulk amounts of such things). Never did manage the 'use the last bits up then quit' maneuver, for me it's always had to be dumping the whole habit at a random moment of "Augh! ENOUGH!".
I'm not terribly surprised so much of Slashdot is on drugs. Hell, most of the world is. It is jarring that you can have a Slashdot discussion on copyright and musicians and so many people will leap in arguing in defense of THE LAW and yet, drugs? Those don't seem to count, you don't see the same arguments, the same ferocity. I am for decriminalization, though, mostly so you can get a tax base on drugs, and so we can start dealing with the unpleasant realities of the situation out in the open rather than having them still there but always kept secret. Criminalization doesn't do shit to diminish drug use, frankly.
If anybody needed to see someone saying 'I stopped using drugs, you can stop', I'm quite happy to say it. If that sounds real trivial then you wouldn't understand:) now, I know loads of people will flame me as usual and eat my karma for daring to suggest that a person might be happier without drugs. Well, that's too bad, because that's what I found. These days I'm not a balky machine running on drugs and keeping a constant quiet inventory of my 'fuels'- I'm just me (albiet with plenty of coca-colas:) )
It seems to me that this is a good thing to be- anybody else wanting to try it, ask yourself- do you want to be free?
This is only a relevant comment for binary-only releases. Perhaps the dominant way Linux is used is now to run proprietary binary-only software, but it _is_ worth mentioning that for a long time the dominant type of software was redistributable, free source code, and with that you are safe to assume that if you have gcc then one way or another you can compile it on your platform.
Naturally, there are caveats- for instance, I never did manage to get the Open Look window manager running on my linuxPPC system:) however, the basic point still holds, or used to.
If we're in fact going to use proprietary binary-only x86 software for everything, why not just use windows and have lots more of it?
"Imagine if music used the open source model, as exemplified by Red Hat, et al. Musicians would write music, and not get paid for it. They'd have to work as waiters or cashiers for a living, or maybe to some live performances if they're lucky. The music labels would sell "distros" that would have music from various artists. They would have some sound engineers on staff to do some tweaks to the sound on their distros to make them sound a bit better. You could either download the music for free, or buy the music in the store (but you're really buying a box and "technical support"). In the latter case, only the label makes any money. The musicians rarely, if ever, make a cent off of the work they did. Yup, that sure sounds like a great business model..."
ROFL! Talk to some musicians. Your fears of the future for an 'opensource' musician actually describe the lot of a musician in the existing industry. It's no way to make a living, and switching to some other model would be no hardship for most musicians, who already deal with fulltime dayjobs and actually spend money at their art rather than earn money with it- and I'm talking about signed musicians.
I think it would be very interesting to see ideas thrown around for opensource music business models. The ones that work would (interestingly) share huge amounts in common with the existing strategies for maybe (if you're lucky + willing to work hard) gaining instead of losing off the current industry. In other words, putting together a business plan, financing the gear you need to do your job (and _only_ the gear you need- good advice is that if you're not a sound engineer, don't build a studio, rent time at one and prepare well), putting a lot out there for exposure (which invariably seems like throwing it away, whether it's mailing off 50 expensive promo kits or allowing people to download your MP3s), and then having some means (gigs, merchandising, a little indie label) to get income from people who want to clap _and_ throw money.
It sounds like a better deal than the industry, because it is a better deal than the industry. The only caveat is that it's even more obvious that you have to have a business plan to make money- that or I hope you have a good manager:) however, this is not in fact _different_ from the status quo in the industry, it's just more in-your-face: nobody would dream of putting across a fiction that you could sit at home giving away MP3s and people would pay you for it, where by contrast some people like putting across the fiction that with the industry there's some chance of sitting at home recording songs and the industry will pay you for it. And that's nonsense, you need the business team and a plan.
In some ways I have to agree with this sentiment, because I find I'm already taking sides. I feel I can't cooperate with this nonsense, and that I have no choice but to _first_ put everything I have behind open formats and free digital exchange of information, and only then to think about whether I can even earn any money at it. The exchange of information, the fluidity of Net interaction and searchability and instant access, has to come first.
"One day, you'll be able to see the movie you want to see- _when_ you want to see it" - AT&T ad
Turns out that day's already here, for music, and everything will have to change to accomodate this new reality.
The irony is that, now, today, I can already tell a non-geek friend about, say, the MPAA arranging to have police arrest a 15-year-old, and my friend will be shocked and surprised. As these horrible attacks on civil liberties and 'the underground' continue, there's one very obvious result- it will _make_ an underground, where there wasn't one before. Force people to take sides and you might not be able to always control which side they pick. The more horrible the news, the more heinous the abuses, the more well-established and well-equipped the underground will be.
I personally am happy to be a musician and sound engineer- it means I have the opportunity to align myself with this new underground without specifically getting heavy into pirating and ripping other people's work. I may think that the whole paradigm change makes their desire to control said work kind of antiquated (read: doomed), but the happy truth is that I personally can remain unpunishable, 'legal' even w.r.t stupid and inequitable law, and still noisily side with those who are totally 'illegal'.
All this has opened my eyes, frankly. I've got a friend who's basically an obsessive warezpuppy. I'm not, and I always used to act a bit superior about it. Well, what's with that? Maybe my friend is just living out the fluidity of the Net more than I do. I see the temptation, and tend to play it boring and safe and not try to get away with anything, but exactly what am I supposed to be respecting here? The system that is gearing up to tromp me into the ground and take away the promised wonders of the 21st century, to lock me into a strictly 80s model for how the world, commerce, media work?
People should look at that aspect. Because we _will_ have the 21st century. We _will_ have the worldwide connectivity, the effortless exchange of information and media, and that _will_ change the way the world works.
The only question is, will this be in harmony with business and government, fought by business and helped by government, strictly underground for only those smart enough to know the ropes, or an outright civil war of some sort with police kicking in geek doors over and over throughout the first years of the 21st century?
A lot of my interaction with Slashdot has been squawking about the artist perspective on the music and film industry's abuses.
I haven't changed: I'm still building my recording studio, still waiting for the ADAT to get back from being fixed, still building all the auxiliary equipment I need (finally finished the recording multiband compressor the other night- thing is the audio hardware equivalent of a crazed Unix console app that can do anything, but with demented syntax- it's an art form just twiddling the controls on this bugger).
I'm also still looking for ways to tap into good publicity for 'free' ideas and inventions- will certainly begin sharing everything that goes into this hardware design as soon as it seems to be going to an unarguably public place. This is very heavily influenced by open source software. My whole approach to the world has been colored by open source software, the GPL, and my learning to identify with these values. In this way, 'our eggs' don't necessarily belong to one vendor, one company or even one platform or one field of endeavor- I think it's just as important to pursue 'free' audio electronics hacking and share information in a way similar to the GPL- specifically because going strictly philanthropic and public domain is just asking for abuse, it's just putting power in the hands of _collective_ entities such as corporations which can stomp all over individials. For software, the GPL puts some rules on behavior that legislates good behavior. I'd like to see something similar for strictly idea exchange and inventions, or we may be looking at an intellectual property Dark Ages, where you're not allowed to think or innovate because everything is already 'owned' in one way or another.
That said, of course this conglomeration is unpleasant and nasty. VA Linux has a fiduciary duty to not help other Linux companies, and at the same time is bound by things like the GPL to limit the extent to which they can hurt other people in the community they are theoretically a part of. The people behind things like Slashdot have ended up paper millionares in many cases- and we're not talking dollars, unfortunately, we're talking stock, which means their personal wealth is equal to exactly how much _their_ little projects or big companies can hurt the other people in the community. I think that unlike the hardcore e-business such as MS, many of the Slashdot people will geniunely choose to suffer financial losses rather than hurt the community- this is not unthinkable, for instance Richard Stallman actually declined offers of stock options. However, this can only be a personal choice- for instance, Rob Malda can and probably would choose to suffer losses of half his stock money rather than hurt the community by damaging another Linux company or project. But if Rob is a corporate officer, he's not allowed to make such a decision- he's required to hurt the other Linux company, because it is his legal duty to the stockholders and he is breaking the rules if he doesn't.
This, not the specific ownership of Slashdot, is the problem, and it's been a long time coming- there have been people pushing for the adoption of the corporate, big-business model (most notably ESR) for a long time, and people who've become upset and argued against it.
Well, now we get to see what Linux is like when it is all owned by corporations which aren't allowed to share or be nice to each other, and controlled by stock-option millionares whose riches are directly linked to their Linux competition doing badly or failing outright. We can expect to see basically the same state of affairs as commercial software, up to and including the privacy messes we've been wailing about in Slashdot columns...
...with one subtle but significant point. The code is still GPL. The net is still technically accessible to individuals for publication of pages and information. As things become a mirror of proprietary software in the 'mainstream' Linux world, the underground will remain and thrive, no longer represented by just any site or company with 'Linux' in the name, but still out there and living by the principles that started all this. You may not see any reference to this stuff on corporate Linux sites or Slashdot, Red Hat and VA and Corel may censor any reference to such sites in their software installations, Freshmeat might not run updates from developers which criticise the parent company etc etc and so on in a litany of disturbing possibile outcomes, but there will be the people out there maintaining the original community, and they will continue to be able to do so regardless of what corporate Linux does to try and marginalize them.
It's a pity things have gone this direction, but freedom doesn't grow on trees. If you don't fight for it, it erodes and fades away- but you can usually grab a bit of it for yourself anyhow, if you try.
Slashdot Mirror
It is too costly to try and use patents similarly, and it's not an analogous case (which is why you sense it isn't as elegant). Instead of advocating a free method of permanently making works free to all who will treat them a certain way, you are advocating a staggeringly expensive method of confining works within restrictions that can only be overcome through agreements. Your end result is not a large body of work that is copyright a particular way, it is a large body of work with significant legal entanglements for the industry, easily abused by people in moments of annoyance or through prejudice.
It's sort of like this. The GPL does not concern itself with the motives of its users, only with their interaction with itself. A developer can be the most proprietary, patent-seizing bugger in the world, but he can still use GPLed work all he likes as long as he upholds its requirements. Now, in this patent proposal, how many people are advocating that the portfolio be used as a weapon and withheld from all those who will not share their patents with us? How many people want the portfolio withheld from Microsoft, from Unisys, from other 'enemies'? Isn't the whole point of a patent portfolio to selectively withhold it from others in order to make them do what you want?
This is the key difference between an opensource patent portfolio and the GPL, and why I adamantly oppose the accumulating of any such portfolio. GPLed works are available by default, and only your refusal to comply with the terms denies you access to them. Patents are unavailable by default, and only coming to an agreement with the patent holder entitles you to them. Even without the cost, even without the many people wanting to punish others in the industry, I still could not tolerate this proposal, because it does not diminish the problem of patents at all. It only furthers it and brings new levels of politicking and trouble to the OSS community.
What I would like to see, instead, is a glaringly public Open Concepts website, not just for software developers but for general inventors to use. At this site you could write up everything you've invented, and have it hosted somewhere searchable where people can get at it, where the patent office can do searches through it, where it's out in the open. Such publication would be effectively public domain (or it could specifically be made public domain), so a good idea could be instantly seized on by individuals _and_ the monstro-corps- the distinction is that, if an idea is listed on this hypothetical site, it is a case of prior art and blocks any patents from being filed along those lines.
THAT is what I see as a useful reaction to patent hell. How do you expect to deal with chokingly restrictive intellectual property issues by making more of them? The only way is to establish a place, a method, where people can choose of their own free will to cooperate instead of hoard. Then, you have to make that method a block against other people abusing this freedom- with the GPL, this is done by copyright, and requiring the license to be propagated, and in so doing, you prevent someone from grabbing all the code and making it proprietary again. With this public domain site proposal, this is again done by using the rules against themselves- in this case, rather than having code being made proprietary, the behavior you want to block is of somebody taking the ideas and patenting them. By making the ideas formally public (in the scientific tradition, BTW), you are blocking anyone's ability to go and patent those ideas, yet as with the GPL, they are free to _use_ them as long as it's within the accepted restrictions. For the GPL, that means you can never un-GPL the thing as a third party and remove people's access to it. For this proposed PD storehouse, it means you can never patent an idea taken from the storehouse, and remove people's access to it.
I'm sorry, but your patent-portfolio entirely depends on arbitrarily removing people's access to it. I realise that many people feel removing the access for 'bad people' is a good thing, but I can't agree with that, and I strongly suggest that it will not have the results you want from it.
There's a level of inefficiency built into the system specifically to avoid straight-up vote over issues, and specifically to avoid democracy. Think for a second about what you are suggesting. Consider what votes you'd get for the following issues:
- What is the official American OS? (Windows/Mac/Linux/Be)
- How much taxes should people pay? (twice as much as now/same as now/nobody should pay any taxes)
- Should Microsoft be allowed to innovate and help consumers by standardizing the world on its products? (Yes, they have that right/No, they should not be allowed to help consumers if it hurts Sun)
Beginning to get the picture? Direct democracy is basically an open invitation to pure Politics As Spin, and it is very likely that you'd be the first against the wall, you slashdot reader hacker criminal type youThe problem is, it's well accepted that larger factions _will_ stomp all over smaller factions given the slightest opportunity. That's the way it's always been, and certainly watching the tech industry does _not_ suggest that this tendency has changed with the increase in technology we've seen.
The question you need to ask is, exactly how do you keep all littler factions from being taken out and shot? That's basically what happens as soon as you start attempting to use pure democracy. For instance, in pure democracy applied to the computer industry, this very website is grossly undeserving of any support or 'mindshare'. It isn't about windows- it wastes huge amounts of resources, periodically slashdots other sites and eats bandwidth and offers _nothing_ to support Windows, which clearly has the numbers. Now, if Windows users mostly _want_ Slashdot that would be a different story, but under direct democracy there is no room for the concept of 'Loyal Opposition' much less underground or radical factions. It's a powerful homogenizing force that only begins to really kick in when people sense that they have the power to use this 'direct democracy'.
It's not merely the 'Bread And Circuses' problem, it is worse because you get factions seemingly 'competing' in much the same way that the largely unregulated computer industry has been 'competing': playing dirty as hell, and winner-take-all. If you think having the RIAA and MPAA around treading on your rights is a problem, imagine what happens when The People get to vote on these issues! These associations have media resources that would blow your mind, and sure as 'hacker' is spun to sound like a terrorist, you'll get the issues presented in such a way that Orwell would drill through his grave, and The People will cheerfully vote to have to taken out and shot if you reverse engineer software programs. Hell, I could see _programming_ _itself_ made illegal for the unlicensed, given the right spin- such as these DOS attacks, or some credit-card-oriented spin.
You don't know how lucky you are to live in a system where any particular faction is basically tied up in red tape. If you want to see what direct democracy looks like, look at Microsoft in the tech industry, and imagine them without the DoJ or any government. The trouble is you can't expect people to take an interest in everything: at least the representatives can be expected to read 4000 page bills and the like, as that is their job. You cannot expect the general public to read 4000 page bills before voting on them, so the vote becomes pure armwrestling over how things are phrased and spun. That's not really democracy because people are being fooled...
The trouble is, this approach is based on seeing themselves as everyman's favorite success story, the plucky little company with everyone's best interests at heart. They need a _lot_ of goodwill to get away with a mudslinging contest with reputable names in the industry, much less with the justice system (many people would _like_ to believe the courts are fair- not kangaroo courts only out to beat up poor MS). Many MS people do believe that they have that goodwill, in the same way that many Nixon people believed he had the support of the country through Watergate. But that goodwill isn't there- it's been eroded through abuse, and the fatal arrogance of MS is not in making such bold challenges to industry leaders and the law, but in trusting that public opinion remains on their side through it all. It does not.
The difference is _also_ in the pre/post stages, for instance it doesn't matter how nice your data is if you just run it through J. Random Op-Amp. It's very very common to find extremely crap parts in these supposedly perfect digital devices, and this limits them unfairly. Rotten cheap little op-amps, pathetic coupling caps to save costs- I've bought a _recording_ deck of fairly high end pretensions, an Alesis LX-20 ADAT, and while it does 24 bit recording, and while digital is in theory quite capable of dealing with bass _very_ nicely indeed, this recorder nevertheless has pathetic 47uf coupling caps on the channel outs. This says that they designed to be 3db down at maybe 30hz- they designed out the capacity for clean accurate subsonic information that digital HAS. I'll be rewiring it, probably with 100uf which will at least take the low end down closer to 10hz or so. This will also clean up boominess in the low bass, as when you near such a cutoff you end up getting a certain amount of accentuation- a unit with 47uf cutoffs might 'thunder' pretty impressively but lowering the cutoff frequency produces a cleaner and more responsive sound in those frequency ranges, less muddy. Translates in sonic terms to a touch less sub-bass but going deeper, bass that is markedly clearer and less prone to get in the way of other musical information.
So essentially it's _both_. Yes, digital audio at CD levels is substantially lacking, but on the other hand most of the equipment makes it sound even worse than it is. I'm a rock guy, not really a classical music person, and I know that I've been able to get rid of a _lot_ of the 'polite, sterile, thin' qualities of digital audio by just treating the players and recorders like they were instruments, and tweaking things like the highs. To some extent you really can give the hardware itself more life and energy by letting the digital outputs come through the analog opamps and circuitry as unimpeded as possible. This does also include allowing the noise floor to have normal op-amp noise, transistor hiss. It's not even intrusive, but attempts to completely obliterate this normal circuit noise inevitably also take a major toll on the music.
You start running into _serious_ problems when you treat the band as strictly what the human ear can pick up. Apart from the fact that subsonics are picked up by the inner ear and supersonics can be sensed though not heard through bone conduction, the trouble is that you get cancellation effects and distortions depending on how you roll off the extremes of the band. This is a nightmarish problem for CD audio, as it must put a _really_ steep filter above 22K if not still lower- a brick wall filter that is about as bad as you can get for causing interactions with lower frequencies. Personally, I prefer to start rolling off a lot lower but a lot more smoothly, but that's just me.
As for the sawtooth, I'm afraid that's the reality. Look, if you take the input signal a bit higher, you start getting a subharmonic through the sampling which can be almost as loud as the sampled frequency! You surely are not suggesting that nearly 100% additive distortion is perfect reconstruction? Try sampling a 44.09 wave at 44.1, obviously you get nothing but the subharmonic. Now try sampling a _22.045_ wave, which technically is supposed to be within the band. Begin to see the problem? The same subharmonic distortions are still affecting you, even within the band. For fun, consider how this affects (less and less) frequencies at 11.0225, 5.51125, and 2.755625K. Each time you're basically halving the distortion- so the interference goes from about 100% at 44.09K to 50% to 25% to 12.5% to 6.25% interference at 2.755625K. But wait, a tone at 2K should be perfect! No, more like a tone at _2.75625K_ (note 756 instead of 7556) will be entirely free of subharmonic distortion sampled at 44.1K, and a tone at 2.755625 is a pathological worst case for that sampling rate w.r.t subharmonic distortions. So be sure not to let your musicians play that frequency ;)
If you think I'm making this up you should study harder. _Everything_ has its limits, and digital recording is interesting because with it, you can really rigorously quantify exactly what and where the limits are. The ones who told you it was perfect reconstruction were not scientists, they were corporate marketers attempting to replace the LP in popular media with the CD. Sure worked, didn't it? Even got many people believing the mathematically, provably wrong claims of no distortion. To me, _SIX!_ percent subharmonic interference in a pathological worst case frequency at a mere 2K or so is pretty damn distorted, frankly. Don't know about you. Maybe I just try harder to overcome this stuff rather than wishing it away...
What _isn't_ usually noticed (surprisingly) is the more logical purpose for those huge cables and absurd slew rates and amperage levels- the _big_ transients. Get a whole horn section to raise the hairs on the back of your neck with a FFF line- or for that matter get the whole orchestra going, or for that matter early Who, with those incredibly strong saturated compressed vocals (very 'tubey' sounding) and LOUD guitars and LOUD drums. You'll have loads of transients stuffed into the music that go way beyond what you can pack into 'polite' digital playback at 44.1/16, especially when the digital equipment designers continue screwing it up by anally plastering HF-rolloff capacitors all over everything to eat the tiny negligible hiss that the transistors and analog opamps produce.
When put onto a record, these naturally stress the cutting lathe, but that's why cutting lathes went from 100 to 500 to kilowatt amplifiers that fed off 440 volt lines etc ad nauseam. When placed on a record surface, these are not tiny dustlike details that get scrubbed off with the first play. They are fscking big walls of material that tend to fling the needle physically into the next groove and cause skips. When they don't, you get vinyl playback that has the kind of energy and aggression and life that LPophiles talk about.
A realworld example sure to appeal to CmdrTaco's heart: The Who's album Live At Leeds was released with a label that said in big scrawly letters, "CRACKLING NOISES OK- DO NOT CORRECT". When played on a high end turntable, do you in fact get crackly noises? No, you get the Who, live. It's the same as orchestral recordings breaking up at FFF and fancy cartridges that don't break up at those modulation levels.
Obviously, no matter how abused the LPs get, you continue to have those energy peaks undiminished. They outlast all the other sounds, and they are exactly what you don't get with current digital media- hence the audiophiles. This provides us sound engineer types a very interesting and exciting challenge. How do we translate this into the digital domain? I've found that multiband compression and physically modifiying the digital recorders to be the best bet. In particular, it's impossible to both get most of the energy and also suppress all the noise of the analog parts. You have to treat the circuits as if they were high end analog circuits even if the opamps are kind of cheap, and get rid of 'total hiss elimination' caps. Often this gives you the proper presentation, and in the cases where things become too bright and edgy, inductive resistance (easily got by those digital noise filters- ferrite chokes, in other words) is a hell of a lot better for the sound than ringy little ceramic chips to ground.
Katz writes:
- to a general audience
- to an _uneducated_ general audience, one that is not necessarily intelligent
- sound bites, which are compressed 'Reader's Digest' style ideas simplified for the masses
- repetitively, to restate the sound bites often enough that even the dumbest viewer will hear them
- without opinion- at least in theory. This is very characteristic of TV journalism. "Whether or not these brave geeks will change the world remains to be seen. One thing is certain- time will tell." TV journalism often pointedly avoids expressing opinion.
None of this implies Jon Katz is intentionally talking down to Slashdot, or mocking us, or treating us like idiots. He is genuinely trying to communicate- the way he learned how. It gets messier when his hysteria and passionate opinions butt heads with the learned need to suppress opinion, and it is then that he behaves like the worst of TV journalism- producing dumbed down hysterical screeds under a cloak of impartiality.It would be better for Jon to learn that this _is_ a new world, and that the rules are different. It's not relevant for him to try so hard to appear like he's not expressing an opinion- that is for TV anchorpeople to do- in the role of web journalist iconoclast, it is more appropriate for Jon to claim his biases out front and express them openly.
He does indeed connect the geek world to mainstream society- and indeed to mainstream media. I wish he would just _accept_ that this is his role- he is awfully prone to enjoy being called up by ABC, BBC and the Associated Press (due to his credentials as former CBS executive producer- why else?), but he insists on being treated as an outlaw web journalist by his peers, by us his Slashdot audience. It doesn't work that way- even before the full story of his position came out, people sensed that he seemed to be slumming, that he apparently was more privileged and was writing for Slashdot like it was some kind of game. That doesn't get you much street cred.
Yet, the reality is this- Jon has repudiated _most_ of the power and Big Media influence he once had, apparently because he got disgusted with it and decided to close the door on that part of his life. He only seems to be slumming- in reality, he's being a searcher, just like his running to the mountain book would suggest, and he _wants_ the street cred, wants a new role he can respect. He no longer wants to suck up to big media (despite appearances)- it's us he wants to be accepted by, but his habits and learned methods are so Big Media that it all comes off wrong and he fails to click with his desired audience. (trust me on this- _everything_ he's ever done that's self-aggrandizing is What One Does if you play the media game well- not doing it is being a media _luser_- Katz is _no_ media luser, he's a BMediaKingpinFH)
Recognizing this, he has no choice but to try to behave like the people abusing him are just ill-behaved children acting out. He doesn't _want_ to go running back to CBS or wherever, and be a TV producer again. He apparently _hated_ that. He _wants_ to find not just a role here, but a community that accepts him. Look at how much he talks about community, how often he swears that he _is_ supported by a vast community in email, that they are the _real_ geeks, not his critics. And it's his own past working against him- his own habits that trip him up and set him against the interests of most slashdot geeks.
It's a tough position Jon Katz is in. If he was to quit with the sound bites, stop writing to general audiences, not answer when called by ABC and BBC and AP, he would gain little and throw away most of the advantages he _does_ have. Yet he seems unwilling to accept these advantages for what they are- he is shamed by them, it seems, he wants to be something much deeper than an ex-TV-producer with good connections and the knack of writing to general audiences.
Well, I'd say this to him: having finally learned enough about you to feel I at last understand you a little better, having tirelessly criticised you under my own name out in the open until I became one of the two names you cited as sort of 'braver flamers/critics', I think you should STAY- but you have _got_ to start using your advantages rightly. Be out-front about it! You're Slashdot's translator for general audiences. You're the guy whose number is called by big media when they want _your_ opinion. You, Jon, have the potential to be a bridge, and rather than turn against all the things you learned in your 'other life', you should embrace them- because they are setting the tone for your writing anyhow, you can't avoid that. You _do_ write sound bites, so write good ones. You _do_ write to an uneducated general audience which doesn't even read Slashdot- so do that and do it well and count on people outside the Slashdot norm coming to see what the fuss is about and finding your articles the only ones that speak to them, that translate and explain what they are seeing. You _do_ have connections: normal people don't just get hired by Wired and Rolling Stone and called up by big media reps (Wired and RS stringers certainly don't get the Beeb asking them what the latest media merger means!). Use those connections. When they ask about geek/techie things, be able to answer them. When big media needs to see a certain side of things (i.e. DeCSS), hint off the record that they need to cover things a certain way or they will appear the tools of corporate influence. You _know_ how to do this stuff.
*g* Luke, it is your destiny! ;)
They aren't. I am a Slashdot author, and I'm conspicuously present in the public forums. I did the Borgification and Interface article. I have every intention of doing another, heartily encouraged by at least Roblimo who posted the last one- when I have something well-developed enough to say that I'm ready to spend some days writing it, just as if it was for print.
I tend to run long but not, I think, repetitively- basically the only time I feel I have an article is when I have a _lot_ of ground to cover. I disagree strongly with some of Katz's writing principles- I figure, if you are not quite sure you are right, why are you writing anything at all? The world has a way of _editing_ your rightness- unless you are truly pigheaded there's no reason to be wishywashy and pretend you don't have an opinion. If you are off base you _will_ be corrected, and at that point your notion of what is completely right will change. Rightness is not really a destination, it's more of a process- it is time based. I took pains to time-stamp the argumentative essays on airwindows.com for just this reason. When I go back and look at my ideas later, some of them will be wrong in the new context.
I feel that to fully interact with a world that is both embracing and hostile, you have to have both humility and selfconfidence- not one or the other, _both_ in large amounts. I figure I do pretty well on those grounds, mostly because I have to. I believe Jon Katz is on the one hand lacking in humility (which is a _very_ easy and obvious criticism to make) but on the other hand, lacking in selfconfidence. This sets him up to try and pull rank and _assert_ a superiority he does not feel and isn't entitled to- which is a large part of why he's not slugging it out in the threads like writers like me.
I can only guess at the reasons for this, but I'd single out Jon's attempts to censor his past from himself- he doesn't honor all parts of his life. He was a very heavyweight media exec, the Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News, and this seems to have horrified him so much that he attempts to call this another, now disdained, life. It is as if that life is not part of him at all.
Unfortunately, you can't do that- I suppose Thomas Merton, Jon's Trappist monk, led a more sheltered life which did not contain elements of shame. This is why Jon would be drawn to him, but it wouldn't equip Merton to be able to teach Jon about coming to terms with all elements of his life- and so he hasn't, and this is a barrier preventing Jon from dealing with us on equal terms.
I realize that I am a _strange_ candidate for bringing further enlightenment, but on other hand I'm one of the two critics Jon named who post under their own names with their own emails handy. I too have had supportive email from intelligent people over this. In retrospect, I'm a little disappointed in myself that I didn't consider the idea that _Jon_ felt inadequate: I know perfectly well how this sort of thing works, and now we have all the clues (former big media job that was repudiated, shame over past 'lives', efforts to behave 'born again' to totally disclaim the former life and not accept it in the slightest way) to see that, as so often happens, Jon's seeming arrogance is compensation. It reads as arrogance, but comes from feelings of inadequacy. Beating on him frankly doesn't help alter this, it perpetuates it, and I'm not surprised Jon resents such beating though he can't articulate it in a way that will help to stop it.
I would suggest,
I, for one, would not continue saying 'no' if that was the question. Jon, people desperately want to resolve the contradictions in your presence here, but they can't until you come to terms with the contradictions within yourself. I'm almost completely sure that a lot of this stems from the whole 'rejection of media trendy' thing you've done to yourself- completely rebelling against what had to be a major part of your life, and desperately searching for something to redeem it, make it like it never happened. How about instead asking if perhaps Slashdotters could accept these parts of you? I see no reason why that wouldn't happen. In effect, you have decided for yourself that being a bigshot executive producer was _so_ bad that nobody can possibly accept you unless you pretend it didn't happen. It would be much healthier and more effective if you quit trying to deny entire parts of your life, and got honest about them. You pontificate a bit much for a writer- but there's a harmony and appropriateness about your pontificating as a writer-ex-bigshot-TV-producer... a friendly one, one that really loves geek culture and wants to further it, help it. That is likeable, more likeable than an incongruously bombastic philosopher-writer...
Be who you are, and I know that many of _my_ objections to your presence, your writing, will tend to fade away. This is because of who _I_ am: I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I do tend to fixate on such incongruities and hammer them into the ground- it's my nature, I have a tough time letting go of such things. It looks to me now that there's a path for you to be in more harmony with Slashdot, but it requires you to quit trying to redefine yourself using Slashdot as a tool- and _accept_ yourself, including the bits that shame you, with slashdot as an environment.
For the first time in a long time I'm genuinely happy I don't filter you, because this is just the sort of insight I needed to get... I might actually start wanting to hear from you if you can grow in this way. The key point is that not being who you are is a barrier: you've been getting defensive, you fight it, you try to be superior to avoid having your barrier broken, avoid the "He's nothing but a 'tired TV producer'!", and in doing so you cut off any chance of real communication- which is your only hope of thriving in the new media, much less as a person among other people.
Be who you are. Slashdot will accept a writer/pontificator/ex-TV-producer. What it will not accept is somebody who insists on being So Much More than an ex-TV-producer. Your efforts to 'rise above' what is only part of your life are separating you from the people whose community you want to belong to...
This is so, so wrong- just _listen_ to how it sounds. "Probably, maybe, other people can use this GPLed software, if they ask _nicely_ and he's not having a bad day- he probably doesn't have any reason to forbid their access to the GPLed software so it shouldn't be much of a problem..." I feel _ill_ :P isn't this exactly what's supposed to never happen? I want to see this situation nipped in the bud, immediately. This is the license I use for my software and I gave no permission for it to be rewritten in this manner...
Probably not, but it's dead simple to monitor where the users go, and who's going to argue that the company shouldn't monitor the usage of these computers that they themselves supplied? Then it's simply a matter of the 'chilling effect' of wondering whether you can be fired from Ford because they know you read slashdot and fear you are a hacker :)
This becomes basically carte blanche for the company to legally search and seize everything you do, at work or at home. Legally you end up not having a private life since so much activity can be done and coordinated over a computer that the company actually provided. There's no way a present-day court would allow a citizen any rights under these circumstances. I mean, if you can get your computer seized when _you_ bought it, and impounded and searched, what possible excuse can you have for privacy and right to your own property when the _company_ buys the computer for you?
Jon, Jon, Jon. You really ought to read slashdot...
Not bloody likely for a former Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News...
The man was Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News. With that on your resume you don't _need_ a day job ;)
How did you get to be Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News?
So, in a way, though Jon's self-promotion has little to do with the story, it has everything to do with his presentation of the story and spoke volumes to anyone who was clued enough to think about it- unfortunately, nobody was. It's not that Jon _self-promotes_ and curries favor with these big media companies- if you or I tried to do that we'd fail laughably, if Rob Malda with all his new wealth tried to do it they'd laugh in his face. Jon attempted to con us into thinking he was some wandering outsider journalist, and it must have been fun and gratifying. The power centers of big media remember, and they lost no time in asking the former Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News what he thought about the merger.
I, too, thought Jon was mad for self-promotion, but in fact he's only acting out of habit and being unwilling to give up the power and privilege he apparently walked away from. He doesn't need Slashdot's help to get on the talk show circuit, to sell his book to Amazon. He didn't even need to fight to get on the Rolling Stone masthead, or on Wired. His past was his ticket, the key to open all those doors normally open only to talent and hard work.
That gives me the idea for the one question I'll formally ask...
So, your question is misguided. Instead, one might ask how often Katz has to name-drop or remind people of the privilege and connections he has. What I would be very interested to know is, at what point did the Slashdot crew know Katz was 'in a previous life' (gah! Can we say pretentious?) the Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News? I know that until today I thought he was just a Wired hack writer who also had written for Rolling Stone, but I'll tell you, the Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News _does_ _not_ have trouble arranging interviews. Think about it a second. It's all about networking, who you know. Would _you_ be rude to a 'web journalist' whom you know actually has a history of being Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News? Who might he be rubbing elbows with, in his comfortable 'faux drop-out' stance? I flat guarantee that anybody who _does_ know would fall all over themselves to curry favor with him: and perhaps this is what happened to the Slashdot folks.
I'm afraid Jon _is_ in fact a Bad Writer, by almost any standard. He spells OK, though that might be Microsoft Word...
You see, the revolution has already started, but it's actually the 'geeks' whose heads will roll, and it is the people like Jon 'executive producer' Katz who will be doing the chopping. Yes, there will be much wailing and crashing of NTeeth ( ;) ) but the PHBs would rather die in control than survive only at the mercy of detested 'geeks'.
As for me, I'm unfortunately not socially acceptable enough to fit Jon's image. I have yet to see TPM, only saw the matrix when given a VHS tape of it as a present, and am as likely to enjoy Confucian Chinese culture (The Analects is pretty cool reading) as pop culture, if not more so. If I buy a magazine it's a geeky one- I consider Cinefex (EFX professional geeks) and Ultraflight (ultralight aircraft geeks) to be geeky. I'll devour these for information. I know a lot about many things but never mastered fun or recreation...
And I am OK with this, because _they_ are the ones lining up for the guillotine: http://library.northernlight.com/PN200001132400001 25.html?cb=13&sc=0. Me, well maybe I am just some stupid autistic person who doesn't understand what it is to be properly human, but all this 'rule the world' stuff seems very stupid to me. What will you do with it once you rule it? Who will sanitize the telephones, or middle manage? At least you're led by a tired TV producer :)
Looking around I see: five blank CD-Rom media. Six blank audio cassettes. 12 S-VHS tapes destined for use in a spiffy ADAT. Can anybody give me a figure on exactly how much money I was forced to give to the RIAA for these media alone, none of which is to be used to copy their artists? Also, I am curious- artists use higher quality tapes for master recordings, and in fact the S-VHS is 'required' by my ADAT. Tell me, when I buy more high-quality media, am I taxed _more_ compared to crud tapes, or the same?
I think one reason is very simple- someone who's ended up 'unusual' in one way will be less prone to fall into usual patterns in other ways. In other words, if someone is straight because that's something one doesn't think about, they probably also (at this stage in history) use Windows exclusively on a PC, as that too is something one doesn't think about. (They may well have very strong opinions on trucks or cameras or skis, tho :) )
Frankly, sexual orientation has zilch to do with geekness, except that gay geeks comparatively don't get any either ;) this is more significant of geekness than the actual orientation. It's like priority levels that constantly rate 'debugging this bit of questionable code' over 'going out and flirting or socializing or meeting people'. Naturally, the result is a general lack of sexual fireworks- though not necessarily the _capacity_ for fireworks (remark paid for by the Take-A-Geek-To-Bed Foundation)
As for me? I take pleasure in knowing that, while I am a Linux user and a Mac user and a CLI sympathiser who likes handling linux through xterms and a cordial KDE basher, on slashdot people don't even care or consider my sexual orientation- they are much more interesting in my Mac-ual orientation, or CLI-ual orientation, all the intellectual pursuits that seem much more _important_ than meatspace.
And this is good. It's only when well-meaning people inquire "Are there _any_ gay geeks?" (answer- why no, they're all hairdressers in Greenwich Village! _Everybody_ knows that thilly dahling) that I figure it's worth even mentioning. Oh, and I know of some pretty darn stereotypical (well, more like 'in your face') gay geeks who are also emphatically 'real' geeks. Again, there's no real correlation except for maybe people who are gay are somewhat more likely to also be geeks if they deal with computers. It's not the computers, it's a matter of people conforming to the norm or not. Geekness isn't the norm either.
Unfortunately, what happened to me is what happens to some people- it stopped working for me. It stopped buffering me from the increasingly horrible reality, but I kept getting more and more compulsive about it, and then I'd still be able to step back and look at myself and wonder, what the hell? I'd always put drugs into me like they were fuel, but I began questioning whether a life like that (in worse and worse surroundings) was even worth living.
Roughly around the point where I didn't give a damn anymore and would settle for anything as long as it was different, I quit using, also drinking alcohol. That hasn't changed though I'm somewhat older now. One funny thing- I ended up drinking coffee so intensely that I shook and couldn't think straight! So I ended up giving up coffee 'cos I couldn't use it like a normal person :) still consume caffeinated beverages, but only ones like Coke and black tea.
Last of all I gave up smoking (tobacco), again only when I was good and ready. Good and ready constituted having the flu, smoking anyway (of course ;) ) and being rendered literally unable to breathe at times, in acute pain. I threw away big freezer bags full of tobacco (being a good hoarder I keep bulk amounts of such things). Never did manage the 'use the last bits up then quit' maneuver, for me it's always had to be dumping the whole habit at a random moment of "Augh! ENOUGH!".
I'm not terribly surprised so much of Slashdot is on drugs. Hell, most of the world is. It is jarring that you can have a Slashdot discussion on copyright and musicians and so many people will leap in arguing in defense of THE LAW and yet, drugs? Those don't seem to count, you don't see the same arguments, the same ferocity. I am for decriminalization, though, mostly so you can get a tax base on drugs, and so we can start dealing with the unpleasant realities of the situation out in the open rather than having them still there but always kept secret. Criminalization doesn't do shit to diminish drug use, frankly.
If anybody needed to see someone saying 'I stopped using drugs, you can stop', I'm quite happy to say it. If that sounds real trivial then you wouldn't understand :) now, I know loads of people will flame me as usual and eat my karma for daring to suggest that a person might be happier without drugs. Well, that's too bad, because that's what I found. These days I'm not a balky machine running on drugs and keeping a constant quiet inventory of my 'fuels'- I'm just me (albiet with plenty of coca-colas :) )
It seems to me that this is a good thing to be- anybody else wanting to try it, ask yourself- do you want to be free?
Naturally, there are caveats- for instance, I never did manage to get the Open Look window manager running on my linuxPPC system :) however, the basic point still holds, or used to.
If we're in fact going to use proprietary binary-only x86 software for everything, why not just use windows and have lots more of it?
ROFL! Talk to some musicians. Your fears of the future for an 'opensource' musician actually describe the lot of a musician in the existing industry. It's no way to make a living, and switching to some other model would be no hardship for most musicians, who already deal with fulltime dayjobs and actually spend money at their art rather than earn money with it- and I'm talking about signed musicians.
I think it would be very interesting to see ideas thrown around for opensource music business models. The ones that work would (interestingly) share huge amounts in common with the existing strategies for maybe (if you're lucky + willing to work hard) gaining instead of losing off the current industry. In other words, putting together a business plan, financing the gear you need to do your job (and _only_ the gear you need- good advice is that if you're not a sound engineer, don't build a studio, rent time at one and prepare well), putting a lot out there for exposure (which invariably seems like throwing it away, whether it's mailing off 50 expensive promo kits or allowing people to download your MP3s), and then having some means (gigs, merchandising, a little indie label) to get income from people who want to clap _and_ throw money.
It sounds like a better deal than the industry, because it is a better deal than the industry. The only caveat is that it's even more obvious that you have to have a business plan to make money- that or I hope you have a good manager :) however, this is not in fact _different_ from the status quo in the industry, it's just more in-your-face: nobody would dream of putting across a fiction that you could sit at home giving away MP3s and people would pay you for it, where by contrast some people like putting across the fiction that with the industry there's some chance of sitting at home recording songs and the industry will pay you for it. And that's nonsense, you need the business team and a plan.
"One day, you'll be able to see the movie you want to see- _when_ you want to see it" - AT&T ad
Turns out that day's already here, for music, and everything will have to change to accomodate this new reality.
The irony is that, now, today, I can already tell a non-geek friend about, say, the MPAA arranging to have police arrest a 15-year-old, and my friend will be shocked and surprised. As these horrible attacks on civil liberties and 'the underground' continue, there's one very obvious result- it will _make_ an underground, where there wasn't one before. Force people to take sides and you might not be able to always control which side they pick. The more horrible the news, the more heinous the abuses, the more well-established and well-equipped the underground will be.
I personally am happy to be a musician and sound engineer- it means I have the opportunity to align myself with this new underground without specifically getting heavy into pirating and ripping other people's work. I may think that the whole paradigm change makes their desire to control said work kind of antiquated (read: doomed), but the happy truth is that I personally can remain unpunishable, 'legal' even w.r.t stupid and inequitable law, and still noisily side with those who are totally 'illegal'.
All this has opened my eyes, frankly. I've got a friend who's basically an obsessive warezpuppy. I'm not, and I always used to act a bit superior about it. Well, what's with that? Maybe my friend is just living out the fluidity of the Net more than I do. I see the temptation, and tend to play it boring and safe and not try to get away with anything, but exactly what am I supposed to be respecting here? The system that is gearing up to tromp me into the ground and take away the promised wonders of the 21st century, to lock me into a strictly 80s model for how the world, commerce, media work?
People should look at that aspect. Because we _will_ have the 21st century. We _will_ have the worldwide connectivity, the effortless exchange of information and media, and that _will_ change the way the world works.
The only question is, will this be in harmony with business and government, fought by business and helped by government, strictly underground for only those smart enough to know the ropes, or an outright civil war of some sort with police kicking in geek doors over and over throughout the first years of the 21st century?
I haven't changed: I'm still building my recording studio, still waiting for the ADAT to get back from being fixed, still building all the auxiliary equipment I need (finally finished the recording multiband compressor the other night- thing is the audio hardware equivalent of a crazed Unix console app that can do anything, but with demented syntax- it's an art form just twiddling the controls on this bugger).
I'm also still looking for ways to tap into good publicity for 'free' ideas and inventions- will certainly begin sharing everything that goes into this hardware design as soon as it seems to be going to an unarguably public place. This is very heavily influenced by open source software. My whole approach to the world has been colored by open source software, the GPL, and my learning to identify with these values. In this way, 'our eggs' don't necessarily belong to one vendor, one company or even one platform or one field of endeavor- I think it's just as important to pursue 'free' audio electronics hacking and share information in a way similar to the GPL- specifically because going strictly philanthropic and public domain is just asking for abuse, it's just putting power in the hands of _collective_ entities such as corporations which can stomp all over individials. For software, the GPL puts some rules on behavior that legislates good behavior. I'd like to see something similar for strictly idea exchange and inventions, or we may be looking at an intellectual property Dark Ages, where you're not allowed to think or innovate because everything is already 'owned' in one way or another.
That said, of course this conglomeration is unpleasant and nasty. VA Linux has a fiduciary duty to not help other Linux companies, and at the same time is bound by things like the GPL to limit the extent to which they can hurt other people in the community they are theoretically a part of. The people behind things like Slashdot have ended up paper millionares in many cases- and we're not talking dollars, unfortunately, we're talking stock, which means their personal wealth is equal to exactly how much _their_ little projects or big companies can hurt the other people in the community. I think that unlike the hardcore e-business such as MS, many of the Slashdot people will geniunely choose to suffer financial losses rather than hurt the community- this is not unthinkable, for instance Richard Stallman actually declined offers of stock options. However, this can only be a personal choice- for instance, Rob Malda can and probably would choose to suffer losses of half his stock money rather than hurt the community by damaging another Linux company or project. But if Rob is a corporate officer, he's not allowed to make such a decision- he's required to hurt the other Linux company, because it is his legal duty to the stockholders and he is breaking the rules if he doesn't.
This, not the specific ownership of Slashdot, is the problem, and it's been a long time coming- there have been people pushing for the adoption of the corporate, big-business model (most notably ESR) for a long time, and people who've become upset and argued against it.
Well, now we get to see what Linux is like when it is all owned by corporations which aren't allowed to share or be nice to each other, and controlled by stock-option millionares whose riches are directly linked to their Linux competition doing badly or failing outright. We can expect to see basically the same state of affairs as commercial software, up to and including the privacy messes we've been wailing about in Slashdot columns...
It's a pity things have gone this direction, but freedom doesn't grow on trees. If you don't fight for it, it erodes and fades away- but you can usually grab a bit of it for yourself anyhow, if you try.