It would hurt if I was foolish enough to work for one of the 'New Economy' companies, if I had banked on the 'New Economy' continuing to roll out indefinitely based on the hype the people raking in the money blathered about for years. That includes the line workers who sucked in the big wages while the rest of us stuck with our regular jobs at 'old economy' businesses.
As it stands, I'm just glad the gas appears to be leaking out of the hype bag gradually enough that the suckers who bought into and in fact became part of the hype storm are now mainly the only people caught in the shit storm.
Well, clearly if it gives WorldCom time 'without having to pay back creditors' it will mean a scarcity of funds at said creditors. That is bound to mean money missing from the 'Net economy.' So 'none whatsoever' is far from the case.
Any and all 'physical property' is just the embodiment of 'intellectual property' into physical forms. An automobile is a reordering of atoms with intellectual property that makes it into a vehicle useful for transport. When you purchase an automobile, all you are doing is 'leasing' somebody's intellectual property, in the form of the tools and know-how that transformed the raw ore into a vehicle.
Many would argue the same is true for a recording of music. It happens to be far easier to make a facsimilie of a recording of music, but the recording of the musical performance is really just somebody's IP forged into a recording that can be played back, the same as an automobile is somebody's IP forged into an automobile.
And NO, you couldn't just make a copy of an automobile, or it's engine. There are intellectual property laws that would prevent it. There's no 'qualitative leap' between the IP in a modern engine and the IP in a music recording. Both are protected designs. Both are instances where you pay someone else to do something better than you ostensibly could.
Far be it for me to change your mind. But I don't have to change your mind. I can just nod approvingly when society as a whole agrees with me, and you are prohibited from acting freely on your beliefs.
The GPL is an ideological attempt to use IP laws to push an agenda which some consider just another variation on IP restriction. It's very political, just as all sides in any arguement about IP. There's no 'natural law' of IP. That was my main point.
Of course, there's nothing to stop the band from selling their CD download online for a reasonable amount, say $7.50, with the MP3s encoded at 384 instead of 128, and a "try before you buy" version at 64 for trading online.
There's nothing to stop the artists from doing this except the lack of 'Digital Rights Management' functionality, to keep people from downloading the 384 version their friend (or the guy their friend contacted in IRC) paid for. Otherwise, it becomes the sad, sad wasteland that high-functionality (as opposed to not-better-than-freeware) in shareware suffers from.
This is the cue, of course, for the free software people to chime in. And they're certainly encouraged to chime in, when there is, for example, a Freeware product as good as the un-crippled (registered version) of the CoolEdit audio recording software available.
The GIMP is the posterchild for this sort of media-editing software, and it's such a freak occurance that a whole X11 toolkit (and Gnome, etc.) evolved out of the project.
It sounds to me like it's pure ideology, not a 'reality.' Either we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are wrong, and share away, or we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are fair, and prohibit sharing and punish people who break the rules. Either way it is 'ideology' driving the way things are done.
The second 'ideology,' incidentally, is the only one by which the GPL is enforcable. If there are no copyright laws, businesses will start distributing software under 'trade secret' restrictions. Things like Linux. Not the Linux of today, but the one that supports the hardware, the office apps, etc. Think of the worst scenario Stallman drags out to describe a closed-source Linux, and you have it.
You're running a mixed assortment of third party software on that iPaq, aren't you? In this sort of embedded environment (and yes, Hewlett-Packard, now Agilent, put Windows 98 in a $15,000 logic analyzer as the embedded OS) the application software is tightly coupled to the OS. No third party crap at all is installed. The drivers are specifically designed for the application. The whole bundle as a piece is tested thoroughly.
It's not like your crap-box machine that you install random hardware and junkware off Geocities sites onto.
It's clear that this whole thread is really just a 'have fun slagging Microsoft' free-for-all because there's been little or no common sense discussion about any of the above.
When I bought 'Mastering Regular Expressions' I figured I was buying a book that wouldn't go out of date. Like all the classic O'Reilly books, it wasn't something trendy, it didn't have a software version number in the title....
Something makes me suspicious that the author just bought a new power boat and 2nd Edition buyers are paying for it.
A tech? That book makes you a screwdriver operator. I couldn't find the chapter about wire wrap, and there wasn't squat about breadboard grounding techniques?
The GPL'd alternative, of course, is that you have to release the source code if you want to release a version where the customer is allowed to change the channel (by changing a DEF in a header file and recompiling).
I would say that Unix uses well defined standards and file formats. Further, I would say that various Linux distros, in their drive to become more 'user friendly' are slowly drifting over to running GUI croft and goop to replace well defined standards and file formats.
A big part of why I bailed to running NetBSD. All the references in the O'Reilly books still work.
Interix isn't a competitor to Cygwin. Interix is an entire POSIX subsystem that runs directly on top of the NT Kernal layer. Cygqin is a hacky Win32 DLL that runs beholden to the Win32 subsystem. That means it translates through an entire extra layer. Also, Interix is a certified POSIX environment. Interix is... well... a hacky Win32 DLL.
Now it's just a matter of some GNU programmers coming out with a knock-off version that's not as good, but good enough. First, though, we need to come up with a name. It has to be a clever twist on BitKeeper.
I nominate:
'ByteLoser'
Who wants to slap up the SourceFarce page and start working on the icon?
Actually, I would say that it's because he's a writer. The Mac was and is a graphical machine. The WYSIWYG aspect of it is a distraction to people for whom the words are what is important.
He doesn't come off as 'anti-Microsoft for the sake of anti-Microsoftness.' He comes off as somebody deeply disappointed by the way Microsoft Word (and all the other tools he's come across) interferes with his work.
Really, I am starting to wonder if a guy like him wouldn't be most productive if someone showed him how to use the vi editor with CVS, and a limited subset of LaTeX. Break his writing up into sections and set things up so he can comment out, annotate, etc. everything as he works.
Then we would be faced with the embarassing answer, from the agent who set up the sale of these machines:
"We only did it because Microsoft was hassling us for selling 'naked' PCs. So we put that other thing on the hard drive of the computers. Everybody knows it's a space-holder, like the cardboard PC on the computer desk in the furniture department."
I would think that '3. Zealots' would go on the 'AGAINST' list.
Also: If electronics department managers took the dive and installed a Linux PC for their departments, employees who worked there could play with it and learn about it.
Then the employees would get fired for screwing around on a computer when they're supposed to be keeping the teens from stealing CDs.
I am wondering why the hell it's considered a good design to be able to open a Mac case while the computer is on. Are the drives, memory, or CPU hot-swappable? Not hardly.
It seems like an opportunity for the typical Mac user to foul up their system beyond belief.
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It would hurt if I was foolish enough to work for one of the 'New Economy' companies, if I had banked on the 'New Economy' continuing to roll out indefinitely based on the hype the people raking in the money blathered about for years. That includes the line workers who sucked in the big wages while the rest of us stuck with our regular jobs at 'old economy' businesses.
As it stands, I'm just glad the gas appears to be leaking out of the hype bag gradually enough that the suckers who bought into and in fact became part of the hype storm are now mainly the only people caught in the shit storm.
Well, clearly if it gives WorldCom time 'without having to pay back creditors' it will mean a scarcity of funds at said creditors. That is bound to mean money missing from the 'Net economy.' So 'none whatsoever' is far from the case.
Any and all 'physical property' is just the embodiment of 'intellectual property' into physical forms. An automobile is a reordering of atoms with intellectual property that makes it into a vehicle useful for transport. When you purchase an automobile, all you are doing is 'leasing' somebody's intellectual property, in the form of the tools and know-how that transformed the raw ore into a vehicle.
Many would argue the same is true for a recording of music. It happens to be far easier to make a facsimilie of a recording of music, but the recording of the musical performance is really just somebody's IP forged into a recording that can be played back, the same as an automobile is somebody's IP forged into an automobile.
And NO, you couldn't just make a copy of an automobile, or it's engine. There are intellectual property laws that would prevent it. There's no 'qualitative leap' between the IP in a modern engine and the IP in a music recording. Both are protected designs. Both are instances where you pay someone else to do something better than you ostensibly could.
Far be it for me to change your mind. But I don't have to change your mind. I can just nod approvingly when society as a whole agrees with me, and you are prohibited from acting freely on your beliefs.
The GPL is an ideological attempt to use IP laws to push an agenda which some consider just another variation on IP restriction. It's very political, just as all sides in any arguement about IP. There's no 'natural law' of IP. That was my main point.
Of course, there's nothing to stop the band from selling their CD download online for a reasonable amount, say $7.50, with the MP3s encoded at 384 instead of 128, and a "try before you buy" version at 64 for trading online.
There's nothing to stop the artists from doing this except the lack of 'Digital Rights Management' functionality, to keep people from downloading the 384 version their friend (or the guy their friend contacted in IRC) paid for. Otherwise, it becomes the sad, sad wasteland that high-functionality (as opposed to not-better-than-freeware) in shareware suffers from.
This is the cue, of course, for the free software people to chime in. And they're certainly encouraged to chime in, when there is, for example, a Freeware product as good as the un-crippled (registered version) of the CoolEdit audio recording software available.
The GIMP is the posterchild for this sort of media-editing software, and it's such a freak occurance that a whole X11 toolkit (and Gnome, etc.) evolved out of the project.
It sounds to me like it's pure ideology, not a 'reality.' Either we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are wrong, and share away, or we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are fair, and prohibit sharing and punish people who break the rules. Either way it is 'ideology' driving the way things are done.
The second 'ideology,' incidentally, is the only one by which the GPL is enforcable. If there are no copyright laws, businesses will start distributing software under 'trade secret' restrictions. Things like Linux. Not the Linux of today, but the one that supports the hardware, the office apps, etc. Think of the worst scenario Stallman drags out to describe a closed-source Linux, and you have it.
Also, the WINE project starts out with the goal of running Windows on top of a whole layer of stuff in a different OS.
This isn't something to ride on top of a Unix clone. It's independent, it will take direct control of all the hardware, etc.
You're running a mixed assortment of third party software on that iPaq, aren't you? In this sort of embedded environment (and yes, Hewlett-Packard, now Agilent, put Windows 98 in a $15,000 logic analyzer as the embedded OS) the application software is tightly coupled to the OS. No third party crap at all is installed. The drivers are specifically designed for the application. The whole bundle as a piece is tested thoroughly.
It's not like your crap-box machine that you install random hardware and junkware off Geocities sites onto.
It's clear that this whole thread is really just a 'have fun slagging Microsoft' free-for-all because there's been little or no common sense discussion about any of the above.
When I bought 'Mastering Regular Expressions' I figured I was buying a book that wouldn't go out of date. Like all the classic O'Reilly books, it wasn't something trendy, it didn't have a software version number in the title....
Something makes me suspicious that the author just bought a new power boat and 2nd Edition buyers are paying for it.
A tech? That book makes you a screwdriver operator. I couldn't find the chapter about wire wrap, and there wasn't squat about breadboard grounding techniques?
The GPL'd alternative, of course, is that you have to release the source code if you want to release a version where the customer is allowed to change the channel (by changing a DEF in a header file and recompiling).
I would say that Unix uses well defined standards and file formats. Further, I would say that various Linux distros, in their drive to become more 'user friendly' are slowly drifting over to running GUI croft and goop to replace well defined standards and file formats.
A big part of why I bailed to running NetBSD. All the references in the O'Reilly books still work.
Major typo there. Last sentence should read: "Cygwin is... well.. a hacky Win32 DLL."
Interix isn't a competitor to Cygwin. Interix is an entire POSIX subsystem that runs directly on top of the NT Kernal layer. Cygqin is a hacky Win32 DLL that runs beholden to the Win32 subsystem. That means it translates through an entire extra layer. Also, Interix is a certified POSIX environment. Interix is... well... a hacky Win32 DLL.
By prohibiting the use of closed source applications wherever security is of any importance!
Dude,
We've determined that you don't have a printed copy of the source code for your motherboard's BIOS printed out and beside you on the desk.
One of our agents will be by with a chip puller to remove the BIOS rom in a few minutes.
Try to cooperate with him and we'll go easy on you.
I haven't been breaking into other people's computers lately, so I'm not sure I need to run screaming away from the US.
Please, by all means: if based on your behavior you feel this law threatens your future freedom, feel welcomed to leave.
Now it's just a matter of some GNU programmers coming out with a knock-off version that's not as good, but good enough. First, though, we need to come up with a name. It has to be a clever twist on BitKeeper.
I nominate:
'ByteLoser'
Who wants to slap up the SourceFarce page and start working on the icon?
I remember the slide rule. In fact, there's a sliderule package for FreeBSD that will also compile quite easily on NetBSD.
I am considering a move to the U.K. to be with a significant other.
If you met her in a chat room, make sure s/he's really, really significant before moving overseas.
Actually, I would say that it's because he's a writer. The Mac was and is a graphical machine. The WYSIWYG aspect of it is a distraction to people for whom the words are what is important.
He doesn't come off as 'anti-Microsoft for the sake of anti-Microsoftness.' He comes off as somebody deeply disappointed by the way Microsoft Word (and all the other tools he's come across) interferes with his work.
Really, I am starting to wonder if a guy like him wouldn't be most productive if someone showed him how to use the vi editor with CVS, and a limited subset of LaTeX. Break his writing up into sections and set things up so he can comment out, annotate, etc. everything as he works.
I would think that '3. Zealots' would go on the 'AGAINST' list.
Also: If electronics department managers took the dive and installed a Linux PC for their departments, employees who worked there could play with it and learn about it.
Then the employees would get fired for screwing around on a computer when they're supposed to be keeping the teens from stealing CDs.
You may be right. There are only Mac ghettos at a few select retailers these days.
The days when there was a little half an aisle of Mac software at the back of every store are long gone.
I bet the editor who decided to post this crap has a little shop where he sells those ugly cases.
Look again, around the Slashdot site. In Preferences there have suddenly appeared all kinds of new Apple topics in the last several months.
This article has been placed here as an opportunity for the Apple astroturfers to poke fun at a cheap case and hype all that wunnerful Apple hardware.
This place is getting to be more of a Mac shill site every week.
I am wondering why the hell it's considered a good design to be able to open a Mac case while the computer is on. Are the drives, memory, or CPU hot-swappable? Not hardly.
It seems like an opportunity for the typical Mac user to foul up their system beyond belief.