If you're local to the Silicon Valley, you might care to check out the Vintage Computer Festival at the San Jose Convention Center on the weekend of 30 September. Nothing less than ten years old will be on display. You may even be able to see working models of Altair and IMSAI machines. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine brought his DEC PDP-8. And there was also the Wall-O-Mac, with every Macintosh model released up to 1993 or so.
I plan on being there. As the owner of two SOL-20 machines (one with a Helios drive), I have a soft spot for the old machines I cut my teeth on.
Back when the CDA was passed (another execrable piece of legislation), there was a call to submit essays to a project called, "24 Hours of Democracy."
The keynote of my essay was that we, as human beings, failed in our duty to educate our fellow human about what it was we've created. Now it seems our isolationism -- nee elitism -- is coming back to bite us.
I made a promise at the end of my essay; I still stand by it. I invite others to make the pledge as well: Teach!!
Why should I care what I do, as long as I get paid? I get paid very, very, very well.
So if I were to offer you a competetive salary to write and maintain an accounting package that automatically maintained a double set of books -- the real set, and the one you show to the film/music artists when they demand a royalty audit -- you'd do it? Without even a moment's hesitation?
How about an email spamming package? Would you do that?
A bunch of volunteers working on an open source project with deep philosophical problems with GPL. Are you from Redmond?
Assuming you were serious (as opposed to Sport-Thwacking:-) )...
The most casual observer of the Open Source community will note the philosphical split between the GPL and BSD camps. There are many people who contribute Open Source work under the BSD license because they disagree with the GPL's compulsory source redistribution requirements. GPL-ers likewise have issues with BSD's terms.
Mozilla is a sufficiently large project that it's easy to envision project members having diverging points of view on this issue. My hope is that, to the extent such disagreements exist, this change in licensing won't adversely impact the development of Mozilla.
Okay, so even though the focus of my concern was that the relicensing might delay Mozilla, people decided instead to focus on my comment concerning M14's stability. The consensus in this thread is that I should Get With The Program, download the latest Mozilla, and give it a spin before criticizing.
Okay, fair enough. I make no excuses. However, if the gallery will admit an explanation: I finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my desktop system from Slackware 3.4 to something using libc6. I wasn't looking forward to it, as it meant a full wipe and re-install. Fortunately, I have an ORB drive, so I was able to snapshot the entire system before wiping it. In the process, I've decided to become a lazy schnook and, rather than upgrade to Slackware 7.0, chose to go with Debian 2.2 (potato).
So there I am, confronted with dselect's list of a bazillion packages, and on a whim decide to install Mozilla. I search, find an entry, and the description says it's version M14. "Hrm, that sounds a bit old," I think to myself, "but it should be good enough to play with..."
After a quick peek, I see that M17 is in Debian's 'unstable' tree. Since y'all have recommended it so highly, I'll snarf it tonight and give it a try.
Schwab
P.S: Wish me luck; I get to repeat this entire upgrade process for my Slackware-based laptop.
The conspiracy-theorist in me believes Micros~1 is trying to steal thunder from LinuxWorld Expo without actually making the announcement themselves. However, such a move doesn't surprise me. Bill Gates has never demonstrated loyalty to anything other than making a buck. If he thinks he can make money selling Office to Linux users, he'll do it without the slightest hesitation.
Those who remember the port of IE to Solaris, however, know that Micros~1 will not adapt their apps to the host OS, but will instead try to graft on enough of Windoze's "architecture" to make it work, just barely.
For example, it wouldn't surprise me in the least for LinuxOffice to require a Windoze-style registry, needed to support per-user preferences. This despite the fact that.*rc files have been around forever. Also, expect a butt-load of COM/DCOM components to get installed requiring root privileges (though the need for these prvileges will never be adequately explained).
But I suspect the biggest delays will come from trying to implement Micros~1's demands for copy protection and to prevent "unauthorized" use of "their" software. So, assuming they work out how to translate NT's methods of "license" administration, expect to be required to install a "license" manager that's completely incompatible with any other "license" managers you may have (and may even interact badly with them). Oh, and the CD key will have 96 digits:-).
In short, this is FUD of the highest order, even higher than normal, since it doesn't come directly from Micros~1, thereby giving them plausible deniability. Even if it's true, I wouldn't expect anything to ship for at least a year and, like the initial release of all Micros~1 products, will probably work quite poorly. Thus, even if you're working on an office suite, this story may effectively be ignored.
Actually, I think her inflated boo^H^H^Hstatistics are due to the fact that someone (not necessarily her) spams the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* heirarchy on USENET with her stuff.
You are Joe Cool-Hacker, a coder of such prodigious and long-standing skill you make Hiro Protagonist look like B1FF. You are invited to an expensive lunch by an oily but well-heeled guy who wants to discuss a project with you. After the initial pleasantries, Oily Guy gets to the point.
"I have an idea that's going to make millions, and I need someone to write it," says Oily Guy.
"And that is?" you reply.
"It's a new form of advertising."
"Uh...," you begin to say.
"Hang on, let me finish," Oily Guy insists. "It's not 'spam' like you guys like to call it. It's search-based. The ads are offered in response to legitimate searches from Gnutella clients. So unless the user initiates a search, they don't see anything."
You are dubious, but you remain cordial. "So the ads aren't sent unless the received search terms match ad's subject matter."
"Well, that's certainly a possibility," Oily Guy responds.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, the advertisers needs the ability to be as narrow or as broad as they wish. So they could respond only to detailed searches or, if they have a broad-appeal product, they could respond to everything."
"Everything," you deadpan, eyes fixed on Oily Guy.
"Yeah. Just like TV ads. A lot of times the ads have no bearing on the program, but they're still effective."
"Doesn't that diminish the value of the resource? I mean, if you opened the phone book to the plumbers section and got listings for sex clubs, doesn't that make the phone book useless?"
"This ain't a phone book. It's the Internet. And the real results will still be there; there'll just be a few ads in with them. It's not like this is illegal or anything. C'mon, there's tons of money to be made here. Aren't you interested in getting rich?"
At that moment, the server arrives offering fresh coffee. Do you:
Kick Oily Guy in the 'nads,
Grab the coffee pot from the server and upturn it over Oily Guy,
Sell out the entire Internet community for your own meager personal gain and agree to write the software.
The person(s) who wrote this software needs to be identified and blacklisted from further employment in our community. This kind of ethical bankruptcy must not be supported or allowed to continue.
Downloading copyrighted music via Napster isn't any different than stealing it from the music store.
Incorrect. But don't feel bad; Lars made the same error in reasoning in a new interview in the San Francisco Examiner.
Digital artifacts are not being transferred away from one party toward another. They are being duplicated, such that both parties now have the artifact.
I wish people would think about these facts more clearly and face the realities of digital media. Otherwise, we're not going to make any meaningful progress on the issue.
It's disappointing to see such an otherwise brilliant man so completely taken in by the media companies' need to protect their works -- a need which has never been convincingly demonstrated; to protect works which, strictly speaking, aren't theirs to begin with, but the originating artist's.
However, digital watermarking does have an important use in the infinite abundance of the digital universe, and it's not what Mr. Shamoon has been led to believe. Watermarks have a compelling use not as a basis for copy protection/management (erroneously referred to as "rights management"), but rather for reputation management.
Think forward to an age where everything -- including physical objects -- can be copied infinitely and perfectly at zero cost. Attempting to control copying in such a world becomes utterly pointless, not to mention childishly foolish. However, being able to track down the original artist(s) behind a given work will become extremely important. One way to do this is with difficult-to-remove watermarks. By scanning the work and recovering the watermark, you are able to identify the original artist, possibly to negotiate with them to do additional, similar work, and you're able to make this identification no matter how many hands the work has passed through. Thus, the artist is assured that their reputation will be preserved, and the recipient of the work knows they can track back directly to the originator rather than a faceless publishing house.
If Mr. Shamoon were to re-think his strategy from identifying and protecting copies (again, a pointless exercise in the digital universe) to identifying and protecting artists, I think he would find a good deal more support from artists, technologists, and consumers.
As for this new SDMI stuff, be very alert for it, as the media corporations are arm-twisting high-tech companies to cram it into everything. For example, Intel is working very hard to incorporate SDMI-like "features" into IEEE-1394 (FireWire). Also, the new Digital Flat Panel signalling standards from the Digital Display Working Group have space in the specs reserved for similar copy protection measures.
Personally, I can't understand why the high-tech companies are giving these guys the time of day. They won't be buying these devices; the consumer will, and the consumer has already made it clear they don't want this stuff.
There's a new organization called Fairtunes.com where you can send a mini-payment ($1, $5, etc.) to the musical artist of your choice. It's an attempt at the "tipping jar" model of artist remuneration.
Let me see if I can't clarify the issue that appears to be at hand here, as people seem to be getting mired in minutiae about what constitutes code.
The GPL outlines only those obligations pertaining to redistribution of code. If you redistribute copies of gcc, you're expected to make the source available, along with all your modifications. If you don't redistribute gcc, you're free to hack it up all you want and you don't have to share your changes with anyone.
Now, let's suppose someone decides to open a compiler farm on the net. You send it source code, and it sends back the compiled binaries. Let us suppose further still that the compiler sitting at the server is a version of gcc that has had tons of local modifications made to it to improve the code generator to at least three-fold over what you can get out of stock gcc.
Question: Does this constitute redistribution for the purposes of the GPL? The gcc binary has never left the server farm, yet gcc's output is being distributed everywhere, and the fruits of those highly-desireable gcc modifications are not being shared among the GPL community.
This appears to be the primary issue at hand. Others will no doubt differ with this interpretation, but it seems to me the GPL was intended to "isolate" software hoarders; that you are free to keep your work to yourself so long as the results/output of that work also remain with yourself. For a large class of problems/jobs, this is perfectly reasonable. But as we see, distributing services based on GPL'd software muddies the water.
Didn't I see somewhere on Slashdot (as if that made it true) a post by someone saying that, according to the courts, enforcement of a patent can never be deemed an anti-competetive act with respect to anti-trust law? Anyone have facts on this point? What tack are the DRAM companies actually pursuing?
If a company is able to arbitrarily go against their posted privacy policy, then consumers should be able to do the same in reverse for any other similar type of contract. IE, I should be able to click on one of Microsoft's "I Agree" buttons on one of their click-through licenses, and then feel free to go against it at a whim. They are both equally valid contracts, [... ]
Incorrect. There is a big fat hairy difference between overt representations and mutually-agreed contracts.
The ad you see in the paper for a hard disk at Fry's is not a contract; the vendor has not entered into a binding agreement to sell you the item at the advertised price. That agreement happens at the cash register. Nevertheless, it is illegal to advertise a particular price, and then refuse to sell at that price (or claim they're out of stock and try and sell you a different piece of merchandise). Such an action is called bait-and-switch, and is rightly prosecuted by the FTC as fraud.
Shrinkwraps, OTOH, claim to be a "contract" constraining your ability to use the merchandise you just bought and paid for. These are monsterously unethical instruments whose legality is still in serious question. See my lengthy editorial on why they shouldn't be taken seriously.
You are attempting to conflate advertised store policy with a binding contract. I am certain that contract law and the fine points of assent to contracts will not be an issue in this case, nor will they be raised by the FTC. This is a straightforward issue of "bait-and-switch" -- consumer fraud.
As for shrinkwraps, the sooner they are abolished, the better.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to call you on that assertion about Atari, since I was staring a bit closer at them than most people.
Atari went through two deaths. The first was in the mid-1980's. Atari was being aggressively mismanaged by its erstwhile parent company, Warner Communications. Their quality control was abysmal (one out of every four machines was DOA), and when their QA department brought management's attention to the problem, the QA department was dissolved. Atari was also the biggest publisher of drek for their own platforms (the 2600 version of PacMan being the most egregious example).
Two things eventually killed their success. One was the bottom falling out of the home video game business (sort of like the more recent shakeout in Internet companies). The other was their monsterous mis-handling of the game E.T. for the 2600 (probably the most spectacular movie tie-in failure ever, closely followed by Jurassic Park Interactive for the 3DO). They manufactured more cartridges than they had sold 2600 consoles, thinking the cart would drive console sales. And, since their QA department no longer existed, the game shipped with a fatal bug which made it impossible to win the game. Atari took a bath, and Warner Communications ended up selling their controlling interest to...
Jack Tramiel, formerly of Commodore, took over Atari. The reason Atari didn't die sooner was that Tramiel knew how to run a company on a shoestring, dispensing with such frivolous expenses as paying outside developers and suppliers. Atari and Commodore were jockeying to gain control of a joystick-making company in Los Gatos, CA, that had started developing a promising new machine. Because negotiating in good faith was an anathema to Tramiel, Commodore ended up acquiring Amiga.
Tramiel, naturally, was furious, and immediately began work on a cheaper, inferior platform called the Atari ST. To its credit, the ST -- hardware-wise -- was what the Mac should have been all along. But it couldn't touch the Amiga. Nevertheless, through aggressive pricing and extremely misleading advertising (not to mention chronic marketing incompetence at Commodore), Atari managed to establish a market for the ST. But by then, Tramiel's reputation was well-known, and found it increasingly difficult to get people to develop new stuff for him.
Atari's last real triumph was the Lynx, a networkable color hand-held video game system, predating the color GameBoy by several years. Developed at Epyx Software (of all places), it had great hardware and great software. Sadly, Epyx found itself victim to Tramiel's standard business style, and went under.
Atari itself went under a few years later, not long after the introduction of its Jaguar home gaming system (a cartridge-based system released at the dawn of CD-based gaming systems). Jaguar was developed and released as a direct retaliation against the 3DO Multiplayer (developed by the same team of people who built the Lynx).
...Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that Atari's failure was due in large measure to chronic mis-management and Tramiel's hubris. It had nothing whatsoever to do with unsanctioned software copying.
Getting back to the core point, however, you are right about PayPal. It would make an excellent "tipping jar" for not just musicians, but anyone creating digital works (Quake maps, textures, Open Source works, etc.).
As a virulent opponent of copy protection systems in any form (because they are childish), it's important to point out that watermarking does have a place in the digital universe. But it's a role very different from the one the media corporations have been feeding you.
In the future, where everything that already exists is copyable thanks to matter replicators or buckets full of programmable nanobots, there will still be a need to create new things that don't exist. There will still be a need for artists.
So, if you want something new created, how do you know which artist to approach? By their reputation. Presumably you'd examine other objects that are close to what you want, then talk to the artist who created them. But how would you know that the person you're talking to is the true creator, not an impostor? By examining the watermark embedded in the work.
Note the subtle distinction here: Media corporations want to use watermarks to uniquely identify each copy. In my proposal, the watermarks identify the designer of the original pattern for the copy. The reason this is important is because, whether you like it or not, there will be bazillions of copies out there. Any one of those copies may find their way into the hands of someone who wants to know more about where it came from. Being pointed at the original artist is considerably more useful than pointing at the guy who obtained that copy.
Schwab
Re:I've wanted to start a company like this..
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Dude, you are just asking for it.
Subscriber pays for movie download, drops it on his FTP server, sez, "c0m3 g3t 1t!" on IRC. Hundreds of copies proliferate, and you "lose" a lot of money. What are you going to do?
Copy protection? Don't make me laugh. Anything you come up with will be hacked in a week. And the DMCA won't help you, either. Besides, the money you will need to spend to maintain the battalion of lawyers to license all this stuff will dwarf any revenues you may hope to earn, even if unsanctioned copying weren't an issue.
I regret to say your idea is a non-starter.
Schwab
Re:Already happened in Hong Kong, a disaster previ
on
Movies Online?
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· Score: 2
What's the objective quality of movie theaters there?
Without any data to back this up (in other words, I'm talking out my posterior), it sounds like the Hong Kong studios made three mistakes. One was not maintaining tighter control over movie prints. Second was not having a VCD release ready and in the pipeline (why buy a crappy bitlegged copy when you can get the official copy for only 50% more). And the third was not beefing up the theaters to make the experience kick ass.
Besides, there are massive cultural differences between Asia and the US. Even with broadband to the home, what happened in Hong Kong is not likely to happen here.
Do the math, Stanley. Let's assume the lowest acceptable resolution for a TV frame: 320*240 at 16 bits per pixel. That's 150K bytes per frame, and there's 30 frames per second. But let's be generous and drop it to 15 frames per second. That leaves us with 2.25 megabytes per second.
And you're telling me you can compress this down to 5.6K bytes (minus IP protocol overhead). While there's plenty of room for improvement in image compression technologies, no one with a brain in their head is talking about compression ratios of more than 50:1 without massive image quality loss. Yet you're claiming this con man would have achieved a near-lossless compression ratio of 400:1.
You, and your former employer, are full of sh*t, dude.
*sigh* You'd think with all my years experience on USENET, I'd know better.
Okay, the slam against Microsoft was gratuitous and unecessary, and for that I apologize.
As for the rest of it, I've scanned my personal archive of our internal OpenGL beta mailing list, and I can find no mention of problems with dropped triangles, nor any mention of attempts to run SGI's flying paper airplane example (where the missing triangles are allegedly visible). I've also searched our bug database; same result. This/. post is the first I have heard of any such problem.
Speaking entirely personally, it is much easier to help people having trouble with BeOS if they address their issues through the channels we've set up or our mailing lists -- not just OpenGL issues, but any issues at all. There are precious few of us here, so we can't respond to everyone individually, but everything does get logged and reviewed. We really do want to make BeOS amazingly great. And, if nothing else, going through channels helps prevent easily excitable people like me from committing social gaffes.
The above poster is either aggressively misinformed, or is deliberately attempting to misinform.
We do not drop triangles. If we do, it is a bug and we'd like to know about it.
Unlike Micros~1, we are not interested in cheating and fudging benchmarks and issuing misleading press releases and pre-announcing non-existent products. We are trying to beat the crap out of Windoze by simply being better than Windoze. With the amazing OpenGL work Jason has done, we're getting closer...
Schwab Be, Inc. Currently working on Intel 810 OpenGL driver
"Didn't you cover this in last month's lecture, sir?"
Slashdot has covered Ogg Vorbis before. Informed posters commented that.OGG files consume approximately 20% more space than equal quality.MP3 files.
I'm sorry, but that's not going to cut it. Some streaming MP3 channels don't broadcast any slower than 56K bps (and 40K bps is about the lowest bit rate I'm willing to tolerate (go DJ Lithium!)). If Ogg requires 20% more data to sound the same, that means a 56K channel has to either sound worse, or go to 67K, which puts them beyond modem users.
I don't have the background to know if the 20% premium is fundamental to the algorithm, or an artifact of it being the first generation of the compressor (i.e. refinements are possible). But I don't think it's going to win many converts until they can sound as good and be within 5% of MP3's data size.
They have a long row to hoe. I wish them all the best.
It'd be great to be able to actually watch high-quality QuickTime clips without either proprietary hardware / software combinations or jerky (or space-hogging) downcoversions.
Since when was Real non-proprietary? You can't get Real's codec without their "integrated player." QuickTime is the same way.
So now instead of just one source for a single-purpose, doesn't-fit-in-with-the-rest-of-the-system media player, you now have two. I suppose this is an improvement, but it's slight at best.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're local to the Silicon Valley, you might care to check out the Vintage Computer Festival at the San Jose Convention Center on the weekend of 30 September. Nothing less than ten years old will be on display. You may even be able to see working models of Altair and IMSAI machines. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine brought his DEC PDP-8. And there was also the Wall-O-Mac, with every Macintosh model released up to 1993 or so.
I plan on being there. As the owner of two SOL-20 machines (one with a Helios drive), I have a soft spot for the old machines I cut my teeth on.
Schwab
Back when the CDA was passed (another execrable piece of legislation), there was a call to submit essays to a project called, "24 Hours of Democracy."
The keynote of my essay was that we, as human beings, failed in our duty to educate our fellow human about what it was we've created. Now it seems our isolationism -- nee elitism -- is coming back to bite us.
I made a promise at the end of my essay; I still stand by it. I invite others to make the pledge as well: Teach!!
Schwab
So if I were to offer you a competetive salary to write and maintain an accounting package that automatically maintained a double set of books -- the real set, and the one you show to the film/music artists when they demand a royalty audit -- you'd do it? Without even a moment's hesitation?
How about an email spamming package? Would you do that?
Schwab
Assuming you were serious (as opposed to Sport-Thwacking :-) )...
The most casual observer of the Open Source community will note the philosphical split between the GPL and BSD camps. There are many people who contribute Open Source work under the BSD license because they disagree with the GPL's compulsory source redistribution requirements. GPL-ers likewise have issues with BSD's terms.
Mozilla is a sufficiently large project that it's easy to envision project members having diverging points of view on this issue. My hope is that, to the extent such disagreements exist, this change in licensing won't adversely impact the development of Mozilla.
Schwab
sigh
Okay, so even though the focus of my concern was that the relicensing might delay Mozilla, people decided instead to focus on my comment concerning M14's stability. The consensus in this thread is that I should Get With The Program, download the latest Mozilla, and give it a spin before criticizing.
Okay, fair enough. I make no excuses. However, if the gallery will admit an explanation: I finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my desktop system from Slackware 3.4 to something using libc6. I wasn't looking forward to it, as it meant a full wipe and re-install. Fortunately, I have an ORB drive, so I was able to snapshot the entire system before wiping it. In the process, I've decided to become a lazy schnook and, rather than upgrade to Slackware 7.0, chose to go with Debian 2.2 (potato).
So there I am, confronted with dselect's list of a bazillion packages, and on a whim decide to install Mozilla. I search, find an entry, and the description says it's version M14. "Hrm, that sounds a bit old," I think to myself, "but it should be good enough to play with..."
After a quick peek, I see that M17 is in Debian's 'unstable' tree. Since y'all have recommended it so highly, I'll snarf it tonight and give it a try.
Schwab
P.S: Wish me luck; I get to repeat this entire upgrade process for my Slackware-based laptop.
The conspiracy-theorist in me believes Micros~1 is trying to steal thunder from LinuxWorld Expo without actually making the announcement themselves. However, such a move doesn't surprise me. Bill Gates has never demonstrated loyalty to anything other than making a buck. If he thinks he can make money selling Office to Linux users, he'll do it without the slightest hesitation.
Those who remember the port of IE to Solaris, however, know that Micros~1 will not adapt their apps to the host OS, but will instead try to graft on enough of Windoze's "architecture" to make it work, just barely.
For example, it wouldn't surprise me in the least for LinuxOffice to require a Windoze-style registry, needed to support per-user preferences. This despite the fact that .*rc files have been around forever. Also, expect a butt-load of COM/DCOM components to get installed requiring root privileges (though the need for these prvileges will never be adequately explained).
But I suspect the biggest delays will come from trying to implement Micros~1's demands for copy protection and to prevent "unauthorized" use of "their" software. So, assuming they work out how to translate NT's methods of "license" administration, expect to be required to install a "license" manager that's completely incompatible with any other "license" managers you may have (and may even interact badly with them). Oh, and the CD key will have 96 digits :-).
In short, this is FUD of the highest order, even higher than normal, since it doesn't come directly from Micros~1, thereby giving them plausible deniability. Even if it's true, I wouldn't expect anything to ship for at least a year and, like the initial release of all Micros~1 products, will probably work quite poorly. Thus, even if you're working on an office suite, this story may effectively be ignored.
Schwab
Actually, I think her inflated boo^H^H^Hstatistics are due to the fact that someone (not necessarily her) spams the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* heirarchy on USENET with her stuff.
Schwab
You are Joe Cool-Hacker, a coder of such prodigious and long-standing skill you make Hiro Protagonist look like B1FF. You are invited to an expensive lunch by an oily but well-heeled guy who wants to discuss a project with you. After the initial pleasantries, Oily Guy gets to the point.
"I have an idea that's going to make millions, and I need someone to write it," says Oily Guy.
"And that is?" you reply.
"It's a new form of advertising."
"Uh...," you begin to say.
"Hang on, let me finish," Oily Guy insists. "It's not 'spam' like you guys like to call it. It's search-based. The ads are offered in response to legitimate searches from Gnutella clients. So unless the user initiates a search, they don't see anything."
You are dubious, but you remain cordial. "So the ads aren't sent unless the received search terms match ad's subject matter."
"Well, that's certainly a possibility," Oily Guy responds.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, the advertisers needs the ability to be as narrow or as broad as they wish. So they could respond only to detailed searches or, if they have a broad-appeal product, they could respond to everything."
"Everything," you deadpan, eyes fixed on Oily Guy.
"Yeah. Just like TV ads. A lot of times the ads have no bearing on the program, but they're still effective."
"Doesn't that diminish the value of the resource? I mean, if you opened the phone book to the plumbers section and got listings for sex clubs, doesn't that make the phone book useless?"
"This ain't a phone book. It's the Internet. And the real results will still be there; there'll just be a few ads in with them. It's not like this is illegal or anything. C'mon, there's tons of money to be made here. Aren't you interested in getting rich?"
At that moment, the server arrives offering fresh coffee. Do you:
The person(s) who wrote this software needs to be identified and blacklisted from further employment in our community. This kind of ethical bankruptcy must not be supported or allowed to continue.
Schwab
Incorrect. But don't feel bad; Lars made the same error in reasoning in a new interview in the San Francisco Examiner.
Digital artifacts are not being transferred away from one party toward another. They are being duplicated, such that both parties now have the artifact.
I wish people would think about these facts more clearly and face the realities of digital media. Otherwise, we're not going to make any meaningful progress on the issue.
Schwab
It's disappointing to see such an otherwise brilliant man so completely taken in by the media companies' need to protect their works -- a need which has never been convincingly demonstrated; to protect works which, strictly speaking, aren't theirs to begin with, but the originating artist's.
However, digital watermarking does have an important use in the infinite abundance of the digital universe, and it's not what Mr. Shamoon has been led to believe. Watermarks have a compelling use not as a basis for copy protection/management (erroneously referred to as "rights management"), but rather for reputation management.
Think forward to an age where everything -- including physical objects -- can be copied infinitely and perfectly at zero cost. Attempting to control copying in such a world becomes utterly pointless, not to mention childishly foolish. However, being able to track down the original artist(s) behind a given work will become extremely important. One way to do this is with difficult-to-remove watermarks. By scanning the work and recovering the watermark, you are able to identify the original artist, possibly to negotiate with them to do additional, similar work, and you're able to make this identification no matter how many hands the work has passed through. Thus, the artist is assured that their reputation will be preserved, and the recipient of the work knows they can track back directly to the originator rather than a faceless publishing house.
If Mr. Shamoon were to re-think his strategy from identifying and protecting copies (again, a pointless exercise in the digital universe) to identifying and protecting artists, I think he would find a good deal more support from artists, technologists, and consumers.
As for this new SDMI stuff, be very alert for it, as the media corporations are arm-twisting high-tech companies to cram it into everything. For example, Intel is working very hard to incorporate SDMI-like "features" into IEEE-1394 (FireWire). Also, the new Digital Flat Panel signalling standards from the Digital Display Working Group have space in the specs reserved for similar copy protection measures.
Personally, I can't understand why the high-tech companies are giving these guys the time of day. They won't be buying these devices; the consumer will, and the consumer has already made it clear they don't want this stuff.
Schwab
There's a new organization called Fairtunes.com where you can send a mini-payment ($1, $5, etc.) to the musical artist of your choice. It's an attempt at the "tipping jar" model of artist remuneration.
I think it's worth checking out.
Schwab
Let me see if I can't clarify the issue that appears to be at hand here, as people seem to be getting mired in minutiae about what constitutes code.
The GPL outlines only those obligations pertaining to redistribution of code. If you redistribute copies of gcc, you're expected to make the source available, along with all your modifications. If you don't redistribute gcc, you're free to hack it up all you want and you don't have to share your changes with anyone.
Now, let's suppose someone decides to open a compiler farm on the net. You send it source code, and it sends back the compiled binaries. Let us suppose further still that the compiler sitting at the server is a version of gcc that has had tons of local modifications made to it to improve the code generator to at least three-fold over what you can get out of stock gcc.
Question: Does this constitute redistribution for the purposes of the GPL? The gcc binary has never left the server farm, yet gcc's output is being distributed everywhere, and the fruits of those highly-desireable gcc modifications are not being shared among the GPL community.
This appears to be the primary issue at hand. Others will no doubt differ with this interpretation, but it seems to me the GPL was intended to "isolate" software hoarders; that you are free to keep your work to yourself so long as the results/output of that work also remain with yourself. For a large class of problems/jobs, this is perfectly reasonable. But as we see, distributing services based on GPL'd software muddies the water.
It's a thorny problem.
Schwab
Didn't I see somewhere on Slashdot (as if that made it true) a post by someone saying that, according to the courts, enforcement of a patent can never be deemed an anti-competetive act with respect to anti-trust law? Anyone have facts on this point? What tack are the DRAM companies actually pursuing?
Schwab
Incorrect. There is a big fat hairy difference between overt representations and mutually-agreed contracts.
The ad you see in the paper for a hard disk at Fry's is not a contract; the vendor has not entered into a binding agreement to sell you the item at the advertised price. That agreement happens at the cash register. Nevertheless, it is illegal to advertise a particular price, and then refuse to sell at that price (or claim they're out of stock and try and sell you a different piece of merchandise). Such an action is called bait-and-switch, and is rightly prosecuted by the FTC as fraud.
Shrinkwraps, OTOH, claim to be a "contract" constraining your ability to use the merchandise you just bought and paid for. These are monsterously unethical instruments whose legality is still in serious question. See my lengthy editorial on why they shouldn't be taken seriously.
You are attempting to conflate advertised store policy with a binding contract. I am certain that contract law and the fine points of assent to contracts will not be an issue in this case, nor will they be raised by the FTC. This is a straightforward issue of "bait-and-switch" -- consumer fraud.
As for shrinkwraps, the sooner they are abolished, the better.
Schwab
Sorry, but I'm going to have to call you on that assertion about Atari, since I was staring a bit closer at them than most people.
Atari went through two deaths. The first was in the mid-1980's. Atari was being aggressively mismanaged by its erstwhile parent company, Warner Communications. Their quality control was abysmal (one out of every four machines was DOA), and when their QA department brought management's attention to the problem, the QA department was dissolved. Atari was also the biggest publisher of drek for their own platforms (the 2600 version of PacMan being the most egregious example).
Two things eventually killed their success. One was the bottom falling out of the home video game business (sort of like the more recent shakeout in Internet companies). The other was their monsterous mis-handling of the game E.T. for the 2600 (probably the most spectacular movie tie-in failure ever, closely followed by Jurassic Park Interactive for the 3DO). They manufactured more cartridges than they had sold 2600 consoles, thinking the cart would drive console sales. And, since their QA department no longer existed, the game shipped with a fatal bug which made it impossible to win the game. Atari took a bath, and Warner Communications ended up selling their controlling interest to...
Jack Tramiel, formerly of Commodore, took over Atari. The reason Atari didn't die sooner was that Tramiel knew how to run a company on a shoestring, dispensing with such frivolous expenses as paying outside developers and suppliers. Atari and Commodore were jockeying to gain control of a joystick-making company in Los Gatos, CA, that had started developing a promising new machine. Because negotiating in good faith was an anathema to Tramiel, Commodore ended up acquiring Amiga.
Tramiel, naturally, was furious, and immediately began work on a cheaper, inferior platform called the Atari ST. To its credit, the ST -- hardware-wise -- was what the Mac should have been all along. But it couldn't touch the Amiga. Nevertheless, through aggressive pricing and extremely misleading advertising (not to mention chronic marketing incompetence at Commodore), Atari managed to establish a market for the ST. But by then, Tramiel's reputation was well-known, and found it increasingly difficult to get people to develop new stuff for him.
Atari's last real triumph was the Lynx, a networkable color hand-held video game system, predating the color GameBoy by several years. Developed at Epyx Software (of all places), it had great hardware and great software. Sadly, Epyx found itself victim to Tramiel's standard business style, and went under.
Atari itself went under a few years later, not long after the introduction of its Jaguar home gaming system (a cartridge-based system released at the dawn of CD-based gaming systems). Jaguar was developed and released as a direct retaliation against the 3DO Multiplayer (developed by the same team of people who built the Lynx).
...Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that Atari's failure was due in large measure to chronic mis-management and Tramiel's hubris. It had nothing whatsoever to do with unsanctioned software copying.
Getting back to the core point, however, you are right about PayPal. It would make an excellent "tipping jar" for not just musicians, but anyone creating digital works (Quake maps, textures, Open Source works, etc.).
Schwab
As a virulent opponent of copy protection systems in any form (because they are childish), it's important to point out that watermarking does have a place in the digital universe. But it's a role very different from the one the media corporations have been feeding you.
In the future, where everything that already exists is copyable thanks to matter replicators or buckets full of programmable nanobots, there will still be a need to create new things that don't exist. There will still be a need for artists.
So, if you want something new created, how do you know which artist to approach? By their reputation. Presumably you'd examine other objects that are close to what you want, then talk to the artist who created them. But how would you know that the person you're talking to is the true creator, not an impostor? By examining the watermark embedded in the work.
Note the subtle distinction here: Media corporations want to use watermarks to uniquely identify each copy. In my proposal, the watermarks identify the designer of the original pattern for the copy. The reason this is important is because, whether you like it or not, there will be bazillions of copies out there. Any one of those copies may find their way into the hands of someone who wants to know more about where it came from. Being pointed at the original artist is considerably more useful than pointing at the guy who obtained that copy.
Schwab
Dude, you are just asking for it.
Subscriber pays for movie download, drops it on his FTP server, sez, "c0m3 g3t 1t!" on IRC. Hundreds of copies proliferate, and you "lose" a lot of money. What are you going to do?
Copy protection? Don't make me laugh. Anything you come up with will be hacked in a week. And the DMCA won't help you, either. Besides, the money you will need to spend to maintain the battalion of lawyers to license all this stuff will dwarf any revenues you may hope to earn, even if unsanctioned copying weren't an issue.
I regret to say your idea is a non-starter.
Schwab
What's the objective quality of movie theaters there?
Without any data to back this up (in other words, I'm talking out my posterior), it sounds like the Hong Kong studios made three mistakes. One was not maintaining tighter control over movie prints. Second was not having a VCD release ready and in the pipeline (why buy a crappy bitlegged copy when you can get the official copy for only 50% more). And the third was not beefing up the theaters to make the experience kick ass.
Besides, there are massive cultural differences between Asia and the US. Even with broadband to the home, what happened in Hong Kong is not likely to happen here.
Schwab
Do the math, Stanley. Let's assume the lowest acceptable resolution for a TV frame: 320*240 at 16 bits per pixel. That's 150K bytes per frame, and there's 30 frames per second. But let's be generous and drop it to 15 frames per second. That leaves us with 2.25 megabytes per second.
And you're telling me you can compress this down to 5.6K bytes (minus IP protocol overhead). While there's plenty of room for improvement in image compression technologies, no one with a brain in their head is talking about compression ratios of more than 50:1 without massive image quality loss. Yet you're claiming this con man would have achieved a near-lossless compression ratio of 400:1.
You, and your former employer, are full of sh*t, dude.
Schwab
*sigh* You'd think with all my years experience on USENET, I'd know better.
Okay, the slam against Microsoft was gratuitous and unecessary, and for that I apologize.
As for the rest of it, I've scanned my personal archive of our internal OpenGL beta mailing list, and I can find no mention of problems with dropped triangles, nor any mention of attempts to run SGI's flying paper airplane example (where the missing triangles are allegedly visible). I've also searched our bug database; same result. This /. post is the first I have heard of any such problem.
Speaking entirely personally, it is much easier to help people having trouble with BeOS if they address their issues through the channels we've set up or our mailing lists -- not just OpenGL issues, but any issues at all. There are precious few of us here, so we can't respond to everyone individually, but everything does get logged and reviewed. We really do want to make BeOS amazingly great. And, if nothing else, going through channels helps prevent easily excitable people like me from committing social gaffes.
My apologies,
Schwab
The above poster is either aggressively misinformed, or is deliberately attempting to misinform.
We do not drop triangles. If we do, it is a bug and we'd like to know about it.
Unlike Micros~1, we are not interested in cheating and fudging benchmarks and issuing misleading press releases and pre-announcing non-existent products. We are trying to beat the crap out of Windoze by simply being better than Windoze. With the amazing OpenGL work Jason has done, we're getting closer...
Schwab
Be, Inc.
Currently working on Intel 810 OpenGL driver
Try checking out the Solaris version of IE. An unmitigated disaster (quelle surprise).
Schwab
I stand corrected; thank you. That is excellent news.
Schwab
"Didn't you cover this in last month's lecture, sir?"
Slashdot has covered Ogg Vorbis before. Informed posters commented that .OGG files consume approximately 20% more space than equal quality .MP3 files.
I'm sorry, but that's not going to cut it. Some streaming MP3 channels don't broadcast any slower than 56K bps (and 40K bps is about the lowest bit rate I'm willing to tolerate (go DJ Lithium!)). If Ogg requires 20% more data to sound the same, that means a 56K channel has to either sound worse, or go to 67K, which puts them beyond modem users.
I don't have the background to know if the 20% premium is fundamental to the algorithm, or an artifact of it being the first generation of the compressor (i.e. refinements are possible). But I don't think it's going to win many converts until they can sound as good and be within 5% of MP3's data size.
They have a long row to hoe. I wish them all the best.
Schwab
Since when was Real non-proprietary? You can't get Real's codec without their "integrated player." QuickTime is the same way.
So now instead of just one source for a single-purpose, doesn't-fit-in-with-the-rest-of-the-system media player, you now have two. I suppose this is an improvement, but it's slight at best.
Schwab