bin Laden: Thinks he knows better than the rest of the civilized world.
Rosen: Thinks she knows better than the rest of the civilized world.
bin Laden: Refuses to acknowledge legitimacy of modern social mores.
Rosen: Refuses to acknowledge legitimacy of modern technology.
bin Laden: Believes his moral values are more important than your freedoms.
Rosen: Believes corporate profits are more important than your freedoms.
bin Laden: Poses an enormous threat to the freedoms and values we have built for ourselves.
Rosen: Poses an enormous threat to the freedoms and values we have built for ourselves.
bin Laden: Responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and four commercial aircraft.
Rosen: Responsible for the destruction of the most comprehensive music archive ever assembled by man.
bin Laden: Responsible for ~4000 deaths.
Rosen: Responsible for 0 deaths.
bin Laden: Unmitigated asshole
Rosen: Unmitigated asshole.
Okay, so Rosen wins on the bodycount. That doesn't she and her cronies shouldn't be watched very closely.
First of all, I want to get one thing straight. Stealing music is illegal.
So is driving faster than 65 MPH. What's your point?
Such that this is, I think that Digital Rights Managment, properly implemented, could be a great thing.
First off, let me correct your terminology. The term "Digital Rights Management" is a smokescreen, intended to deceive the public. Its proper name is Copy Protection. The free market long ago made the decision that Copy Protection subtracts value from digital media, and is not wanted. The software industry, by and large, accepted this, and went on to make trillions of dollars. But now that older media publishing companies are wading into the digital age, they want to re-hash this mess all over again. It's the same basic idea, except this time they've given it the name, "Digital Rights Management."
I encourage you, do not go along with the semantic dodge, and call this stuff by its true name, Copy Protection. The computing consumer already understands what it is, and what it means for his/her investment in digital works.
Secondly, I can assure you that copy protection, by definition, cannot be implemented fairly. The taxonomy you relate is certainly interesting, meriting further study, perhaps as a basis for new legal frameworks. However, copy protection technology is fundamentally unfair. At its core, it presupposes that uses not authorized beforehand by the copyright holder are prima facie unlawful and prohibited.
As Professor Lessig correctly points out, this is pure bullshit.
But, I'm interested to hear, [... ] would DRM really be so bad according to you all? If you bought a car-stereo, a portable stereo, a home stereo, and computer running LinuxDRM (or WindowsDRM), and they were all registered to you, you could buy "Metallica - Master of Puppets (Live with the San Francisco Orchestra).DRM.mp3" and it would run on all your DRM-registered items.
Just so. But in this wonderful world you espouse, where is my right to create a DRM-registered player?
Right now, I can go out and write a visualizer for WinAmp, or XMMS, or Cthugha, or any other music player I care to name, take the digital audio data -- no matter its source -- and convert it into moving visual forms and images. In a world of copy protection, I would not be allowed access to the audio data to create those visualizations because, technically, there's nothing preventing me from, rather than visually transforming the data, just saving it out to disk instead.
So, to write my harmless little display hack, I have to go to the RIAA and fellate some executive to get his permission, in the form of an "authorized player" key, to do so. Not only will this likely cost me thousands of dollars (assuming they don't reject me out of hand as not being a "credible developer"), but they will insist on code audits, precise download and usage statistics, and probably a key renewal fee. Moreover, after doing all this, if I fail to offer the proper ongoing tribute, or someone offers them more money, my "authorized player" key can be revoked, and all copies of my visualizer will stop working. My speech -- in the form of my code -- can be remotely and unaccountably silenced at whim.
All for a fscking display hack.
Now, generalize this to all forms of data meriting "protection": Music, software, text, Web page graphics, user interface layout, font outlines, Quake 3 Arena models, etc. It is not difficult to imagine that "permission" and "authorization keys" will be required to write any piece of software, and that obtaining same will be monsterously expensive, affordable only to wealthy corporations.
Sorry, I'm not buying this. I don't buy for one femtosecond that this level of "protection" is necessary to effect commerce and make fortunes in the digital age. Hell, Bill Gates became the richest man in the world selling stuff that end-users could copy at whim.
These reasons, among others, are why I've arrived at the conclusion: Copy protection is fundamentally unethical, and antithetical to the nature of computing. Copy protection measures as you describe will serve to kill innovation, not spur it.
Looking at a static piece of source code can tell you only so much about a network protocol. You actually have to watch the thing working before you start to see how things interrelate (especially if the commenting was poor). This is why the TCP/IP Illustrated series of books continue to be best-sellers among the networking crowd, even though they've been able to look at the *BSD IP stack source code for years.
Because you've taken the trouble to do dumps and in-depth analysis of a live connection, you are way ahead of the game. The Q2 networking code will be cake for you to take apart and modify.
Natural monopolies, as long as there's oversight and consumer protection, can work.
Your qualifying clause in the middle there is, of course, the key to the whole thing.
You may perhaps be forgetting that the telecommunications industry was ostensibly deregulated around 1996. That was the huge omnibus Federal legislation that included, among other things, the Communications Decency Act. It was touted as being a massive win for consumers as competition would emerge for all services, driving prices down, and help spur the development of new services. "Your cable company and phone company will compete with each other! Prices will fall! What could possibly go wrong?"
What went wrong is that the telecomm companies started merging. Before "deregulation," this was prohibited. Now, rather than engage in the messy and uncertain business of actually competing with each other, they just became the same company.
Now, let's say you're an ILEC. Someone walks up to you asking for a high-bandwidth digital connection. Naturally, you're going to steer them toward your T1 and T3 offerings which are pure profit for you. "But that's ridiculously expensive!" you protest. "Tough sh!t, where else ya gonna go?" they reply.
The ILECs didn't start offering DSL until the CLECs, like Northpoint and Covad, did it first. xDSL service from the CLECs continues to suck because... Well, why aren't you buying a T1?
In fact, sometimes it's BETTER to have a monopoly than not. Look at the mess in California's power when they tried to introduce competition.
Kuro5hin is currently down, or I'd point you to a most excellent article there explaining why this happened. Basically, the deregulation plan in CA was completely botched. They made the power delivery company (PG&E) buy power in the most expensive manner possible, then imposed consumer price caps, disallowing them from passing on those costs to consumers.
However, it should be noted that PG&E used to be both power generation and transmission (the plants and the wires). After deregulation, PG&E split into a power generation arm and a transmission arm, both wholly owned (but separate) subsidiaries of a parent company. So while the transmission arm was going $5 billion into debt paying for power, much of that money was being paid to the power generation arm, which reported record profits. When asked, "Why aren't you cross-captializing?" the parent company had no coherent reponse. There were also other little shenanigans going on, such as power plants taken offline, ostensibly for maintenance, to make power scarce and drive the prices up. And don't ask what happened to the State of California's budget surplus.
So, yes, natural monopolies are fine, iff (if and only if) they are well-regulated.
Jamie Zawinski wrote a most informative rant on the labyrinthine regulations and pitfalls that potentially face anyone wishing to Webcast. As he owns and operates the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco, which does its own share of Webcasting, the man has definitely done his homework. Definitely worth a read.
In the end isn't stemming the flow of unwanted spam essentially the same thing [as the Great Firewall of China]?
No. In the case of the Great Firewall of China (and Saudi Arabia), a third party is attempting to block information people want. As such, the sheer number of minds applied to circumventing those artificial barriers all but assures they will be overcome.
Contrast with spam filtering, where a third party is attempting to block information people don't want, with the full support and agreement from said people. This makes the number of sociopaths trying to circumvent the barriers vanishingly small. Moreover, because people support the blocks, the number of people willing to report spammers who penetrate security is considerably higher (as opposed to the China/Saudi situation, where there's likely a silent agreement that the authorities are not informed when the barriers are breached).
You'll only worry about the activation process if you're running a pirated copy or lack the basic social skills to speak to an activation agent on the phone.
You're missing the point: It's none of their damn business.
Once they sold me the copy, the business relationship is at an end. Who I am, whether or not I install it, my hardware configuration, and any future hardware upgrades are my business and mine alone.
Even if you're not an adherent of the classic value of MYOB, I simply don't trust them. Microsoft has shown again and again that it is not a trustworthy entity. I don't trust them as a business, and I don't trust their products to not defecate all over themselves at the first opportunity, destroy my data, or cede control of my machine to a hostile third party.
Now they're insisting that I offer to them as tribute my personal information (what, the $200 they soaked me for wasn't enough?). The justification for this is to thwart "piracy," to which they claim to "lose" billions of dollars a year. Yet, somehow, the company continues to post record earnings quarter after quarter.
Sorry, I'm not buying it for one nanosecond. Their alleged excuse doesn't stand scrutiny and -- even if it were legitimate -- it doesn't change the fact that it's none of their damn business.
Windoze 98 dies in 2003, huh? Well, then I guess that's when I can no longer buy new Windoze-based games for my machine, since there is absolutely no fscking way I am installing Windows XP on this system. I will absolutely not tolerate invasive spyware and pervasive copy protection measures on my machine under any circumstances. Nor will I move to Windows ME Harder, which was even more crash-prone than Win-98.
If game companies wish to continue to enjoy my custom, they can bloody well port to Linux. Hell, I'll even buy a Mac if I have to. But Windows XP will absolutely never cross the threshold of my home.
I read most of the decision a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, a ray of enlightenment seems to have struck the California courts.
Adobe complained that Softman wasn't allowed to unbundle the Adobe Collection, as that was a violation of their license. According to my (inexpert) reading, the court applied what I call the "duck test" to the transaction that took place between Adobe and Softman: If it looks like a sale and walks like a sale and quacks like a sale then, no matter how persistently and shrilly you call it a "license," it's a sale, because that's the behavior you engaged in.
The court stopped short of stating that the EULA was non-binding. Since Softman never installed the software (triggering the EULA activation clauses), there was no need for the court to address this point. So whether EULAs are binding is still an open question. It may be possible to argue that, if one purchases the software but then refuses the EULA, the terms of the earlier sale apply. That means you would get to use your software, no matter what the EULA says (U.S.C. 17, Sec. 117(a)).
Perhaps Slashdot user Werdna would care to chime in with a more expert analysis?
There is the danger that software industry lobbyists will now lean harder on the California legislature to get UCITA rammed through. So if you're a Californian, get on the horn to your state representative and tell them, as a consumer, you're very happy with the court decision, and that UCITA would undo their good work and should be avoided.
The CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) card was available immediately, as was the high-resolution color monitor. It wasn't terribly popular at first, since it was more expensive, but it was there. I remember hacking on one in a ComputerLand store in the early 1980's. I even wrote a Blockade clone for it in BASIC.
CGA was very primitive. In high-res graphics mode (which was 320 * 200 pixels), you got two hard-coded palettes of four colors each, and two of them were black and white. Character mode offered eight colors in two intensities (sound familiar?). All these old modes live on today as "legacy display modes" on your current graphics card.
Anyone who remembers computing in the early '80's should recognize that the industry wasn't going anywhere. $5000 for an Apple 2? The only software is rudimentary databases and word processors. Games are less sophisticated than those on the Atari 2600. Monitors are monochrome. Apple is enforcing a closed source policy which improves the quality of the machines, but hampers development.
I don't know what parallel universe you were living in, but this isn't my memory of the early 1980's computing scene at all.
The Atari 2600, though popular, was sorely limited. Complex games simply weren't possible. Conversely, Apple-][ games were getting good graphics, and very deep game play. Brøderbund built its entire business on selling high-quality Apple-][ games that beat anything you could get for the Atari 2600.
Apple-][ systems only cost $1500, but that was for the base machine. Disk controllers, drives, and additional RAM were extra. Even though Commodore-64's were going for $300, Apple never lowered the price of the ][ line. You're also forgetting the other major players at the time: Atari with the 400, 800, and 1200 series systems; Commodore with the PET, VIC-20, and C-64; and Cromemco's line of S-100-based systems (popularized by the writings of Jerry Pournelle in BYTE Magazine). I'm probably forgetting a few others, but you get the idea.
Color monitors, though expensive, were quite common. Amdek was the big name in those days.
Apple's "closed policy" didn't really start until the release of the Macintosh in 1984. Prior to that, all the inner workings of the machine were published. I have on my bookshelf a copy of the Apple-][ System Manual, which comes complete with ROM monitor source code, and a fold-out schematic of the machine. Following Apple's lead, IBM likewise published the source to the ROM BIOS in the system manuals (tiny little three-ring binders). The only evidence of a "closed-source" policy at Apple prior to this was when they sued Franklin Computer for manufacturing an Apple-][ clone.
In many ways, the industry was more forthcoming with system and software information than it is now. Back in the 1980's, a request for hardware programming docs would be granted without a second thought. Now they look at you as if you're some kind of foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic.
Jamie's ignores the inconvenient fact it is not clear that any harm to consumers could be proved at all.
You're joking, right?
How about Outlook's Virus of the Week? How about IIS's Vulnerability of the Week? How about ten years of blue screens? How about twenty years of a crappy filesystem that corrupts itself at the first opportunity? (And don't give me any bullshit about FAT being robust. If it were robust, why is SystemAgent set by default to paper over its fragility?) How about a fundamentally b0rk3d system design that the merest child could tell you was a disaster from the start? How about twenty five years of lying to the public (you would call it "marketing" and "PR") about how "innovative" Microsoft is, when in fact they've been strip-mining the industry for other people's ideas, filing off the serial numbers, and presenting them as their own? Good gravy, not even Bill's BASIC was original, being a port from a BASIC interpreter at Harvard (such activity would be considered criminal today by Bill's own set of "ethics").
You're right, but only in a sense that a dissembling lawyer would agree with. It is difficult to measure the harm to consumers, but that does not mean it didn't happen or merit correction.
This is a solution that makes everybody with a legitimate stake in the outcome win.
Except that Microsoft was found guilty of criminal anti-trust violations. They do not get to win. Not by a longshot.
The court already found that Micros~1 charges whatever it wants for its software products, rather than fair market value. As such, Micros~1 should not be allowed to set the value of any software they donate.
In fact, I wouldn't let them donate any software at all. Let them donate cherry hardware (a random distribution of Intel boxes, AMD boxes, and some Macs thrown in for good measure). If Windows is on the boxes, it must be provided for free; if the school wants to upgrade later, they can charge separately for that at upgrade prices (not fresh install prices). The systems may not contain Windows-XP. The systems may not contain any hardware that requires Windows-only drivers to operate (I'm thinking of soft-modems in particular).
In short, make them part with cash, either paid directly to the government, or to hardware vendors who could use the business right now. Do not let them jigger the hardware to force them to use Windows on it. This will create an opportunity for Red Hat/SUSE/Mandrake/etc. to provide software solutions for these organizations.
...I've been using The Brain, which treats documents, programs, shortcuts, program groups, etc as "thoughts" which you can link to any other thought. Pretty cool.
After looking through the site, it reminds me a bit of Ted Nelson's ZigZag, only with a much prettier user interface.
ZigZag basically lets you set up arbitrary "axes" of meaning and drop nodes on them. Any node can contain anything, and be a member of any number of axes. All axes are orthogonal to all other axes. The user interface lets you move along any axis from any node. Thus, information is locally coherent but, if you step back, it's a rat's nest.
For example, for organizing things on your computer, you might create an axis named "Games," and link Quake, Starcraft, and Solitaire to it. Solitaire is published by Micros~1, so you might also set up a Micros~1 axis, which contains Solitaire, IE, Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. Solitaire would be a member of both "Games" and "Micros~1", but not of the "Network-aware" axis, which would contain Quake, Starcraft, IE, Outlook, etc.
ZigZag is very primitive right now, but the concept is very intriguing. Written in Perl and runs under Linux. Check it out.
Many movies vie for the coveted crown of Worst Movie Ever Made. Most people typically award this mantle to Ed Wood's Plan Nine from Outer Space.
They are wrong.
You thought Plan Nine was bad? You thought Waterworld was bad? You thought Highlander II was bad? You have not experienced bad until you have endured the horror, the banality, the stunningly bewildering mess that is...
Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Most movies that people call "bad" are movies that merely failed to entertain them. Manos, however, will have you shaking your head in utter bewilderment as you ask yourself, "What were they thinking?" and, "How could they not know this sucked?" Filmed on grainy 8mm stock (and if it wasn't 8mm, it sure looks like it), the movie is in focus barely half the time, and poorly framed the other half. Scenes plod along at a glacial pace as "actors" stand around in utter silence as the camera continues rolling, waiting patiently for them to remember their lines, or at least ad lib one.
It is worth seeing, just to know that such things exist. You will be amazed. And not in a good way.
Eliminated the moment the RSA patent expired, and good riddance. Their code sucked, anyway.
Real Player and maybe codecs (simply leave them out)
Correct. The system will run fine without them.
USB drivers from Intel
Excised some months ago; it's now all Be's... er, Palm's code.
Optimized graphics routines from Intel
I'm not sure what this refers to. We did get a little help from Intel for the i810 graphics driver, but all those docs are now public, and obtainable from their Web site.
OpenGL was completely re-written. Not a scrap of SGI's original code remains, so that's unencumbered.
Well - if you know what you're doing, it should not be too hard to get the code out.
If you were to open source BeOS (and this is not going to happen, as the principals of neither Palm nor Be want this to happen), you could very easily start with the kernel, a functional set of device drivers, and the app_server. That would get you going. The rest could wait as it was vetted for "compromised material".
The problem is this would be expensive in terms of man-power to do. The engineering would be cheap, but the lawyer time would be ruinous as s/he pored over all of Be's contracts and tried to determine if any piece of any code was covered by an NDA. And given the costs if you guess wrong, there would be a strong tendency to err on the side of non-release.
Given all this, I have -- regretfully -- concluded that BeOS is gone.
BeOS is dead. What on earth would Palm want to continue it for?
No reason whatsoever, and that's a sad thing.
You have no idea what's been lost here. Yes, BeOS had plenty of warts and rough edges that are the hallmark of any desktop system that doesn't have millions of users to help smooth them over (through sheer erosion if nothing else). But there's lots of stuff inside BeOS that was done very right, and now that's lost forever to desktop users.
BeOS did seamless symmetric multi-processing from day one. Yes, Linux does it, too, but never (that I have seen) out of the box. You have to recompile the kernel, something "normal" users don't have a taste for. Further, the pervasive multithreading took full advantage of however many CPUs you had in the machine (it even ran, unmodified, on a prototype 8-way Xeon machine).
BeOS is multi-platform. Originally developed for the AT&T Hobbit processor, BeOS was ported to the PowerPC (which was maintained for as long as was practicable) and Intel processors. Now that Palm is in the picture, BeOS is being ported to the StrongARM.
If there was a BeOS driver for your sound card, it just worked. No recompiling the kernel, no reading highly technical HOWTO files that even experienced programmers have trouble interpreting to work out which compile switches to set, no editing/etc/modules.conf in Mysterious Ways to load the driver with the correct parameters, and definitely no futzing with PNP tools to interrogate and configure older cards.
If the power died, the 64-bit journalled filesystem would lose no data. Just reboot and you're good to go. Linux is only just now getting this with ReiserFS and SGI's port of XFS.
But beyond what was available in the last public release of BeOS (v5.0.3) was what was under development in the EXP tree: a "theme-able" desktop GUI, a completely new kernel-based networking stack that rivalled the speed of Linux and *BSD, further refinement of the audio services, and a complete re-write of the OpenGL system to support hardware acceleration (the Voodoo and ATI Radeon drivers were in excellent shape, and the Intel 810 driver was making good progress (until I ran into that $(EXPLETIVE) opaque chip lockup that I failed to track down)).
Palm has expressed firm disinterest in pursuing any of this. So Gates gets another notch in his belt, and you have one less option for your desktop machine. This, I contend, is not a good thing.
I can't imagine how Jean-Louis Gassée feels right now.
I'm in the middle of pulling down Knick-Knack (Bobby McFerrin rocks), and the quality of the transfer to QuickTime is definitely not what I would expect from Pixar. It appears that they did a very simple and very quick film-to-video transfer. The registration is poor (the frame jumps vertically), and the brightness of the imagery varies.
But most importantly, I think, is that frames have been dropped. In my opinion, this is nearly fatal to Knick-Knack. Knick-Knack has comic timing down to the frame level, nearly as fine as anything done by Tex Avery. By dropping frames -- believe it or not -- part of the joke is lost. Some jokes are three frames long. In particular, I feel the jackhammer scene and cutting torch scene are almost ruined. It's not simply what he's doing that's funny, but how they show him doing it. Every frame is critical to showing that, and I'm surprised and disappointed that they released even a free version in this condition.
If they do the same thing to For the Birds, it will be ruined, too. They're too wonderful to be seen only in this manner. If you get the opportunity, you owe it to yourself to see them at full frame rate.
Seconded. For the Birds is hilarious. The character design on the large bird is wonderful. Pixar's animators once again demonstrate sheer mastery of comic timing. Although John Lasseter is Disney-trained, there are definite Warner Bros. and Tex Avery influences evident in this film, as well as Knick-Knack.
If you have the chance, do yourself a favor and see it.
This "slashdot.org" is full of people who have no regard whatsoever for traditional IP laws and rights and discuss ways to subvert them at every turn.
Dur-hey.
This is because those of us who actually understand these machines have realized their economic implications, and that they make copyrights obsolete.
Computers are designed to copy things. Indeed, computers as we understand them today would be useless if they lacked the ability to copy data and move it around. What the Feudal Intellectual Property Lords are trying to do is tell you, down to the smallest detail, what you can and can't make copies of, and what you can and can't do with those copies.
Consider the program Cthugha, which is an audio visualization program. It takes the digital representation of the music on CD and turns it into a light and color show. The IP Lords assert that, unless you have been granted explicit permission by them to do something with "their" music, you should be held criminally accountable. They have never granted explicit permission for you to run "their" music through a color organ. Hence, copyright violation.
Further, since the output of Cthugha is directly related to the musical input, the output could be construed as a derivative work (since there is no new "creative material", only a purely mechanical translation from audio space to visual space). Absent a license, derivative works are expressly prohibited by copyright law. Hence, using Cthugha is a copyright violation; and Cthugha could be held as a device whose sole purpose is to violate copyrights, and would be banned. (And after all, why should Cthugha's authors profit even reputationally from a color organ that would be useless without "their" music, when the major labels should be able to make money by selling you one?)
This is how adherents to current IP law think. This is not reasonable. This is not forward-thinking. This is not socially redeeming in any way. This is stupid. It is reductio ad absurdum, except that it is being taken seriously. On the contrary, it merits nothing but ridicule.
That's why you're seeing so little regard for, "traditional IP laws and rights." It's because they don't merit respect. The era of ubiquitous and zero-cost manufacturing, as heralded by the computer, makes them irrelevant and obsolete.
Please note extremely carefully: I am not saying artisans and inventors should not be justly compensated for their creative works. But the "traditional" laws we have in place for doing this no longer have any realistic bearing on the real world, since the machines themselves defy the fundamental assumptions made by the law. The whole system needs to be scrapped and re-designed anew.
Since Ogg Vorbis got another mention, it may be worth mentioning that Croteam, creators of the surprise hit 3D shooter, Serious Sam, have announced that their upcoming sequel will have its music encoded using Ogg Vorbis, replacing MP3. Writes Alen Ladavac, "We've tried encoding all the music for SE with Oggdrop at 64kbps and the quality was perfect even at such low bitrate."
I submitted this to Slashdot two weeks ago, and it was rejected. (Hence, "Sore Loser" in the title.)
Now, the ADVANTAGE to having the source is that you can technically work around any of these issues, but generally only by hiring specialists, at a great expense to your company. It's the big white elephant that no one's talking about in the middle of the open source bazarre: "Software freedom! You have the source! You are empowered!" Yes, but at what COST? For most companies, fixing an open source program to make it do what they want, just isn't a viable option.
Gosh, sounds like a market opportunity to me. IF you observe that there are companies that want/need to use Open Source, AND those companies need improvements made, AND they are unwilling to do it themselves, THEN you have an opportunity to sell them your services.
This is hardly different from companies wanting to set up internal company databases, accounting systems, Web services, and other IS functions. Very often, these development jobs are outsourced, and the internal IS department gets to support what gets delivered. There's no reason this basic idea can't be extended to Open Source support.
Further, the whole mish-mash of whether the resulting improvements get Open Sourced becomes a non-issue for the client; the consulting firm simply stipulates in the service contract what happens to the code after the job is done. Cygnus does this all the time with their compiler contracts, and no one has a problem with the public compiler getting better over time.
Finally, it appears IBM has recognized and is advancing on this emerging market. IBM isn't dumb, and they wouldn't do this unless they felt there was money to be made here.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's do a smug little comparison here:
bin Laden: Thinks he knows better than the rest of the civilized world.
Rosen: Thinks she knows better than the rest of the civilized world.
bin Laden: Refuses to acknowledge legitimacy of modern social mores.
Rosen: Refuses to acknowledge legitimacy of modern technology.
bin Laden: Believes his moral values are more important than your freedoms.
Rosen: Believes corporate profits are more important than your freedoms.
bin Laden: Poses an enormous threat to the freedoms and values we have built for ourselves.
Rosen: Poses an enormous threat to the freedoms and values we have built for ourselves.
bin Laden: Responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and four commercial aircraft.
Rosen: Responsible for the destruction of the most comprehensive music archive ever assembled by man.
bin Laden: Responsible for ~4000 deaths.
Rosen: Responsible for 0 deaths.
bin Laden: Unmitigated asshole
Rosen: Unmitigated asshole.
Okay, so Rosen wins on the bodycount. That doesn't she and her cronies shouldn't be watched very closely.
Schwab
So is driving faster than 65 MPH. What's your point?
First off, let me correct your terminology. The term "Digital Rights Management" is a smokescreen, intended to deceive the public. Its proper name is Copy Protection. The free market long ago made the decision that Copy Protection subtracts value from digital media, and is not wanted. The software industry, by and large, accepted this, and went on to make trillions of dollars. But now that older media publishing companies are wading into the digital age, they want to re-hash this mess all over again. It's the same basic idea, except this time they've given it the name, "Digital Rights Management."
I encourage you, do not go along with the semantic dodge, and call this stuff by its true name, Copy Protection. The computing consumer already understands what it is, and what it means for his/her investment in digital works.
Secondly, I can assure you that copy protection, by definition, cannot be implemented fairly. The taxonomy you relate is certainly interesting, meriting further study, perhaps as a basis for new legal frameworks. However, copy protection technology is fundamentally unfair. At its core, it presupposes that uses not authorized beforehand by the copyright holder are prima facie unlawful and prohibited.
As Professor Lessig correctly points out, this is pure bullshit.
Just so. But in this wonderful world you espouse, where is my right to create a DRM-registered player?
Right now, I can go out and write a visualizer for WinAmp, or XMMS, or Cthugha, or any other music player I care to name, take the digital audio data -- no matter its source -- and convert it into moving visual forms and images. In a world of copy protection, I would not be allowed access to the audio data to create those visualizations because, technically, there's nothing preventing me from, rather than visually transforming the data, just saving it out to disk instead.
So, to write my harmless little display hack, I have to go to the RIAA and fellate some executive to get his permission, in the form of an "authorized player" key, to do so. Not only will this likely cost me thousands of dollars (assuming they don't reject me out of hand as not being a "credible developer"), but they will insist on code audits, precise download and usage statistics, and probably a key renewal fee. Moreover, after doing all this, if I fail to offer the proper ongoing tribute, or someone offers them more money, my "authorized player" key can be revoked, and all copies of my visualizer will stop working. My speech -- in the form of my code -- can be remotely and unaccountably silenced at whim.
All for a fscking display hack.
Now, generalize this to all forms of data meriting "protection": Music, software, text, Web page graphics, user interface layout, font outlines, Quake 3 Arena models, etc. It is not difficult to imagine that "permission" and "authorization keys" will be required to write any piece of software, and that obtaining same will be monsterously expensive, affordable only to wealthy corporations.
Sorry, I'm not buying this. I don't buy for one femtosecond that this level of "protection" is necessary to effect commerce and make fortunes in the digital age. Hell, Bill Gates became the richest man in the world selling stuff that end-users could copy at whim.
These reasons, among others, are why I've arrived at the conclusion: Copy protection is fundamentally unethical, and antithetical to the nature of computing. Copy protection measures as you describe will serve to kill innovation, not spur it.
Schwab
Dude, what are you complaining about?
Looking at a static piece of source code can tell you only so much about a network protocol. You actually have to watch the thing working before you start to see how things interrelate (especially if the commenting was poor). This is why the TCP/IP Illustrated series of books continue to be best-sellers among the networking crowd, even though they've been able to look at the *BSD IP stack source code for years.
Because you've taken the trouble to do dumps and in-depth analysis of a live connection, you are way ahead of the game. The Q2 networking code will be cake for you to take apart and modify.
No quest for knowledge is ever wasted.
Schwab
Your qualifying clause in the middle there is, of course, the key to the whole thing.
You may perhaps be forgetting that the telecommunications industry was ostensibly deregulated around 1996. That was the huge omnibus Federal legislation that included, among other things, the Communications Decency Act. It was touted as being a massive win for consumers as competition would emerge for all services, driving prices down, and help spur the development of new services. "Your cable company and phone company will compete with each other! Prices will fall! What could possibly go wrong?"
What went wrong is that the telecomm companies started merging. Before "deregulation," this was prohibited. Now, rather than engage in the messy and uncertain business of actually competing with each other, they just became the same company.
Now, let's say you're an ILEC. Someone walks up to you asking for a high-bandwidth digital connection. Naturally, you're going to steer them toward your T1 and T3 offerings which are pure profit for you. "But that's ridiculously expensive!" you protest. "Tough sh!t, where else ya gonna go?" they reply.
The ILECs didn't start offering DSL until the CLECs, like Northpoint and Covad, did it first. xDSL service from the CLECs continues to suck because... Well, why aren't you buying a T1?
Kuro5hin is currently down, or I'd point you to a most excellent article there explaining why this happened. Basically, the deregulation plan in CA was completely botched. They made the power delivery company (PG&E) buy power in the most expensive manner possible, then imposed consumer price caps, disallowing them from passing on those costs to consumers.
However, it should be noted that PG&E used to be both power generation and transmission (the plants and the wires). After deregulation, PG&E split into a power generation arm and a transmission arm, both wholly owned (but separate) subsidiaries of a parent company. So while the transmission arm was going $5 billion into debt paying for power, much of that money was being paid to the power generation arm, which reported record profits. When asked, "Why aren't you cross-captializing?" the parent company had no coherent reponse. There were also other little shenanigans going on, such as power plants taken offline, ostensibly for maintenance, to make power scarce and drive the prices up. And don't ask what happened to the State of California's budget surplus.
So, yes, natural monopolies are fine, iff (if and only if) they are well-regulated.
Schwab
Jamie Zawinski wrote a most informative rant on the labyrinthine regulations and pitfalls that potentially face anyone wishing to Webcast. As he owns and operates the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco, which does its own share of Webcasting, the man has definitely done his homework. Definitely worth a read.
Schwab
No. In the case of the Great Firewall of China (and Saudi Arabia), a third party is attempting to block information people want. As such, the sheer number of minds applied to circumventing those artificial barriers all but assures they will be overcome.
Contrast with spam filtering, where a third party is attempting to block information people don't want, with the full support and agreement from said people. This makes the number of sociopaths trying to circumvent the barriers vanishingly small. Moreover, because people support the blocks, the number of people willing to report spammers who penetrate security is considerably higher (as opposed to the China/Saudi situation, where there's likely a silent agreement that the authorities are not informed when the barriers are breached).
Schwab
Who are these guys? And who elected/appointed them They Who Shall Decide Intellectual Property Policy For The Rest Of Us?
Seriously, who are they? Who gets selected to be a member, and why?
Schwab
You're missing the point: It's none of their damn business.
Once they sold me the copy, the business relationship is at an end. Who I am, whether or not I install it, my hardware configuration, and any future hardware upgrades are my business and mine alone.
Even if you're not an adherent of the classic value of MYOB, I simply don't trust them. Microsoft has shown again and again that it is not a trustworthy entity. I don't trust them as a business, and I don't trust their products to not defecate all over themselves at the first opportunity, destroy my data, or cede control of my machine to a hostile third party.
Now they're insisting that I offer to them as tribute my personal information (what, the $200 they soaked me for wasn't enough?). The justification for this is to thwart "piracy," to which they claim to "lose" billions of dollars a year. Yet, somehow, the company continues to post record earnings quarter after quarter.
Sorry, I'm not buying it for one nanosecond. Their alleged excuse doesn't stand scrutiny and -- even if it were legitimate -- it doesn't change the fact that it's none of their damn business.
Schwab
Windoze 98 dies in 2003, huh? Well, then I guess that's when I can no longer buy new Windoze-based games for my machine, since there is absolutely no fscking way I am installing Windows XP on this system. I will absolutely not tolerate invasive spyware and pervasive copy protection measures on my machine under any circumstances. Nor will I move to Windows ME Harder, which was even more crash-prone than Win-98.
If game companies wish to continue to enjoy my custom, they can bloody well port to Linux. Hell, I'll even buy a Mac if I have to. But Windows XP will absolutely never cross the threshold of my home.
Schwab
I read most of the decision a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, a ray of enlightenment seems to have struck the California courts.
Adobe complained that Softman wasn't allowed to unbundle the Adobe Collection, as that was a violation of their license. According to my (inexpert) reading, the court applied what I call the "duck test" to the transaction that took place between Adobe and Softman: If it looks like a sale and walks like a sale and quacks like a sale then, no matter how persistently and shrilly you call it a "license," it's a sale, because that's the behavior you engaged in.
The court stopped short of stating that the EULA was non-binding. Since Softman never installed the software (triggering the EULA activation clauses), there was no need for the court to address this point. So whether EULAs are binding is still an open question. It may be possible to argue that, if one purchases the software but then refuses the EULA, the terms of the earlier sale apply. That means you would get to use your software, no matter what the EULA says (U.S.C. 17, Sec. 117(a)).
Perhaps Slashdot user Werdna would care to chime in with a more expert analysis?
There is the danger that software industry lobbyists will now lean harder on the California legislature to get UCITA rammed through. So if you're a Californian, get on the horn to your state representative and tell them, as a consumer, you're very happy with the court decision, and that UCITA would undo their good work and should be avoided.
Schwab
No, it wasn't.
The CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) card was available immediately, as was the high-resolution color monitor. It wasn't terribly popular at first, since it was more expensive, but it was there. I remember hacking on one in a ComputerLand store in the early 1980's. I even wrote a Blockade clone for it in BASIC.
CGA was very primitive. In high-res graphics mode (which was 320 * 200 pixels), you got two hard-coded palettes of four colors each, and two of them were black and white. Character mode offered eight colors in two intensities (sound familiar?). All these old modes live on today as "legacy display modes" on your current graphics card.
Schwab
I don't know what parallel universe you were living in, but this isn't my memory of the early 1980's computing scene at all.
The Atari 2600, though popular, was sorely limited. Complex games simply weren't possible. Conversely, Apple-][ games were getting good graphics, and very deep game play. Brøderbund built its entire business on selling high-quality Apple-][ games that beat anything you could get for the Atari 2600.
Apple-][ systems only cost $1500, but that was for the base machine. Disk controllers, drives, and additional RAM were extra. Even though Commodore-64's were going for $300, Apple never lowered the price of the ][ line. You're also forgetting the other major players at the time: Atari with the 400, 800, and 1200 series systems; Commodore with the PET, VIC-20, and C-64; and Cromemco's line of S-100-based systems (popularized by the writings of Jerry Pournelle in BYTE Magazine). I'm probably forgetting a few others, but you get the idea.
Color monitors, though expensive, were quite common. Amdek was the big name in those days.
Apple's "closed policy" didn't really start until the release of the Macintosh in 1984. Prior to that, all the inner workings of the machine were published. I have on my bookshelf a copy of the Apple-][ System Manual, which comes complete with ROM monitor source code, and a fold-out schematic of the machine. Following Apple's lead, IBM likewise published the source to the ROM BIOS in the system manuals (tiny little three-ring binders). The only evidence of a "closed-source" policy at Apple prior to this was when they sued Franklin Computer for manufacturing an Apple-][ clone.
In many ways, the industry was more forthcoming with system and software information than it is now. Back in the 1980's, a request for hardware programming docs would be granted without a second thought. Now they look at you as if you're some kind of foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic.
Schwab
You're joking, right?
How about Outlook's Virus of the Week? How about IIS's Vulnerability of the Week? How about ten years of blue screens? How about twenty years of a crappy filesystem that corrupts itself at the first opportunity? (And don't give me any bullshit about FAT being robust. If it were robust, why is SystemAgent set by default to paper over its fragility?) How about a fundamentally b0rk3d system design that the merest child could tell you was a disaster from the start? How about twenty five years of lying to the public (you would call it "marketing" and "PR") about how "innovative" Microsoft is, when in fact they've been strip-mining the industry for other people's ideas, filing off the serial numbers, and presenting them as their own? Good gravy, not even Bill's BASIC was original, being a port from a BASIC interpreter at Harvard (such activity would be considered criminal today by Bill's own set of "ethics").
You're right, but only in a sense that a dissembling lawyer would agree with. It is difficult to measure the harm to consumers, but that does not mean it didn't happen or merit correction.
Except that Microsoft was found guilty of criminal anti-trust violations. They do not get to win. Not by a longshot.
Schwab
The court already found that Micros~1 charges whatever it wants for its software products, rather than fair market value. As such, Micros~1 should not be allowed to set the value of any software they donate.
In fact, I wouldn't let them donate any software at all. Let them donate cherry hardware (a random distribution of Intel boxes, AMD boxes, and some Macs thrown in for good measure). If Windows is on the boxes, it must be provided for free; if the school wants to upgrade later, they can charge separately for that at upgrade prices (not fresh install prices). The systems may not contain Windows-XP. The systems may not contain any hardware that requires Windows-only drivers to operate (I'm thinking of soft-modems in particular).
In short, make them part with cash, either paid directly to the government, or to hardware vendors who could use the business right now. Do not let them jigger the hardware to force them to use Windows on it. This will create an opportunity for Red Hat/SUSE/Mandrake/etc. to provide software solutions for these organizations.
Just off the top of my head,
Schwab
After looking through the site, it reminds me a bit of Ted Nelson's ZigZag, only with a much prettier user interface.
ZigZag basically lets you set up arbitrary "axes" of meaning and drop nodes on them. Any node can contain anything, and be a member of any number of axes. All axes are orthogonal to all other axes. The user interface lets you move along any axis from any node. Thus, information is locally coherent but, if you step back, it's a rat's nest.
For example, for organizing things on your computer, you might create an axis named "Games," and link Quake, Starcraft, and Solitaire to it. Solitaire is published by Micros~1, so you might also set up a Micros~1 axis, which contains Solitaire, IE, Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. Solitaire would be a member of both "Games" and "Micros~1", but not of the "Network-aware" axis, which would contain Quake, Starcraft, IE, Outlook, etc.
ZigZag is very primitive right now, but the concept is very intriguing. Written in Perl and runs under Linux. Check it out.
Schwab
Many movies vie for the coveted crown of Worst Movie Ever Made. Most people typically award this mantle to Ed Wood's Plan Nine from Outer Space.
They are wrong.
You thought Plan Nine was bad? You thought Waterworld was bad? You thought Highlander II was bad? You have not experienced bad until you have endured the horror, the banality, the stunningly bewildering mess that is...
Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Most movies that people call "bad" are movies that merely failed to entertain them. Manos, however, will have you shaking your head in utter bewilderment as you ask yourself, "What were they thinking?" and, "How could they not know this sucked?" Filmed on grainy 8mm stock (and if it wasn't 8mm, it sure looks like it), the movie is in focus barely half the time, and poorly framed the other half. Scenes plod along at a glacial pace as "actors" stand around in utter silence as the camera continues rolling, waiting patiently for them to remember their lines, or at least ad lib one.
It is worth seeing, just to know that such things exist. You will be amazed. And not in a good way.
Schwab
Everyone needs to see this episode at least once. You will shake your head in utter bewilderment.
Schwab
Oh, you mean that film with the Paper Chase guy?
Schwab
Eliminated the moment the RSA patent expired, and good riddance. Their code sucked, anyway.
Correct. The system will run fine without them.
Excised some months ago; it's now all Be's... er, Palm's code.
I'm not sure what this refers to. We did get a little help from Intel for the i810 graphics driver, but all those docs are now public, and obtainable from their Web site.
OpenGL was completely re-written. Not a scrap of SGI's original code remains, so that's unencumbered.
If you were to open source BeOS (and this is not going to happen, as the principals of neither Palm nor Be want this to happen), you could very easily start with the kernel, a functional set of device drivers, and the app_server. That would get you going. The rest could wait as it was vetted for "compromised material".
The problem is this would be expensive in terms of man-power to do. The engineering would be cheap, but the lawyer time would be ruinous as s/he pored over all of Be's contracts and tried to determine if any piece of any code was covered by an NDA. And given the costs if you guess wrong, there would be a strong tendency to err on the side of non-release.
Given all this, I have -- regretfully -- concluded that BeOS is gone.
Schwab
No reason whatsoever, and that's a sad thing.
You have no idea what's been lost here. Yes, BeOS had plenty of warts and rough edges that are the hallmark of any desktop system that doesn't have millions of users to help smooth them over (through sheer erosion if nothing else). But there's lots of stuff inside BeOS that was done very right, and now that's lost forever to desktop users.
BeOS did seamless symmetric multi-processing from day one. Yes, Linux does it, too, but never (that I have seen) out of the box. You have to recompile the kernel, something "normal" users don't have a taste for. Further, the pervasive multithreading took full advantage of however many CPUs you had in the machine (it even ran, unmodified, on a prototype 8-way Xeon machine).
BeOS is multi-platform. Originally developed for the AT&T Hobbit processor, BeOS was ported to the PowerPC (which was maintained for as long as was practicable) and Intel processors. Now that Palm is in the picture, BeOS is being ported to the StrongARM.
If there was a BeOS driver for your sound card, it just worked. No recompiling the kernel, no reading highly technical HOWTO files that even experienced programmers have trouble interpreting to work out which compile switches to set, no editing /etc/modules.conf in Mysterious Ways to load the driver with the correct parameters, and definitely no futzing with PNP tools to interrogate and configure older cards.
If the power died, the 64-bit journalled filesystem would lose no data. Just reboot and you're good to go. Linux is only just now getting this with ReiserFS and SGI's port of XFS.
But beyond what was available in the last public release of BeOS (v5.0.3) was what was under development in the EXP tree: a "theme-able" desktop GUI, a completely new kernel-based networking stack that rivalled the speed of Linux and *BSD, further refinement of the audio services, and a complete re-write of the OpenGL system to support hardware acceleration (the Voodoo and ATI Radeon drivers were in excellent shape, and the Intel 810 driver was making good progress (until I ran into that $(EXPLETIVE) opaque chip lockup that I failed to track down)).
Palm has expressed firm disinterest in pursuing any of this. So Gates gets another notch in his belt, and you have one less option for your desktop machine. This, I contend, is not a good thing.
I can't imagine how Jean-Louis Gassée feels right now.
Schwab
I'm in the middle of pulling down Knick-Knack (Bobby McFerrin rocks), and the quality of the transfer to QuickTime is definitely not what I would expect from Pixar. It appears that they did a very simple and very quick film-to-video transfer. The registration is poor (the frame jumps vertically), and the brightness of the imagery varies.
But most importantly, I think, is that frames have been dropped. In my opinion, this is nearly fatal to Knick-Knack. Knick-Knack has comic timing down to the frame level, nearly as fine as anything done by Tex Avery. By dropping frames -- believe it or not -- part of the joke is lost. Some jokes are three frames long. In particular, I feel the jackhammer scene and cutting torch scene are almost ruined. It's not simply what he's doing that's funny, but how they show him doing it. Every frame is critical to showing that, and I'm surprised and disappointed that they released even a free version in this condition.
If they do the same thing to For the Birds, it will be ruined, too. They're too wonderful to be seen only in this manner. If you get the opportunity, you owe it to yourself to see them at full frame rate.
Schwab
Seconded. For the Birds is hilarious. The character design on the large bird is wonderful. Pixar's animators once again demonstrate sheer mastery of comic timing. Although John Lasseter is Disney-trained, there are definite Warner Bros. and Tex Avery influences evident in this film, as well as Knick-Knack.
If you have the chance, do yourself a favor and see it.
Schwab
Dur-hey.
This is because those of us who actually understand these machines have realized their economic implications, and that they make copyrights obsolete.
Computers are designed to copy things. Indeed, computers as we understand them today would be useless if they lacked the ability to copy data and move it around. What the Feudal Intellectual Property Lords are trying to do is tell you, down to the smallest detail, what you can and can't make copies of, and what you can and can't do with those copies.
Consider the program Cthugha, which is an audio visualization program. It takes the digital representation of the music on CD and turns it into a light and color show. The IP Lords assert that, unless you have been granted explicit permission by them to do something with "their" music, you should be held criminally accountable. They have never granted explicit permission for you to run "their" music through a color organ. Hence, copyright violation.
Further, since the output of Cthugha is directly related to the musical input, the output could be construed as a derivative work (since there is no new "creative material", only a purely mechanical translation from audio space to visual space). Absent a license, derivative works are expressly prohibited by copyright law. Hence, using Cthugha is a copyright violation; and Cthugha could be held as a device whose sole purpose is to violate copyrights, and would be banned. (And after all, why should Cthugha's authors profit even reputationally from a color organ that would be useless without "their" music, when the major labels should be able to make money by selling you one?)
This is how adherents to current IP law think. This is not reasonable. This is not forward-thinking. This is not socially redeeming in any way. This is stupid. It is reductio ad absurdum, except that it is being taken seriously. On the contrary, it merits nothing but ridicule.
That's why you're seeing so little regard for, "traditional IP laws and rights." It's because they don't merit respect. The era of ubiquitous and zero-cost manufacturing, as heralded by the computer, makes them irrelevant and obsolete.
Please note extremely carefully: I am not saying artisans and inventors should not be justly compensated for their creative works. But the "traditional" laws we have in place for doing this no longer have any realistic bearing on the real world, since the machines themselves defy the fundamental assumptions made by the law. The whole system needs to be scrapped and re-designed anew.
Schwab
Since Ogg Vorbis got another mention, it may be worth mentioning that Croteam, creators of the surprise hit 3D shooter, Serious Sam, have announced that their upcoming sequel will have its music encoded using Ogg Vorbis, replacing MP3. Writes Alen Ladavac, "We've tried encoding all the music for SE with Oggdrop at 64kbps and the quality was perfect even at such low bitrate."
I submitted this to Slashdot two weeks ago, and it was rejected. (Hence, "Sore Loser" in the title.)
Schwab
Gosh, sounds like a market opportunity to me. IF you observe that there are companies that want/need to use Open Source, AND those companies need improvements made, AND they are unwilling to do it themselves, THEN you have an opportunity to sell them your services.
This is hardly different from companies wanting to set up internal company databases, accounting systems, Web services, and other IS functions. Very often, these development jobs are outsourced, and the internal IS department gets to support what gets delivered. There's no reason this basic idea can't be extended to Open Source support.
Further, the whole mish-mash of whether the resulting improvements get Open Sourced becomes a non-issue for the client; the consulting firm simply stipulates in the service contract what happens to the code after the job is done. Cygnus does this all the time with their compiler contracts, and no one has a problem with the public compiler getting better over time.
Finally, it appears IBM has recognized and is advancing on this emerging market. IBM isn't dumb, and they wouldn't do this unless they felt there was money to be made here.
Schwab