Ah, yes, thanks for reminding me why I abandoned Slashdot before. Trolls like you get +5 "Insightful" and legit commentary gets marked down as "Troll." That's what happens when you let the monkeys run the monkey house. Any moderator who isn't willfully out to trash Slashdot should be ashamed to have marked up your post, especially now that you've proven your trollfulness by posting the same response to every reply. Then again, recent experience gives me doubt that any such moderator exists. Glad I quit taking advantage of the opportunity to moderate; wouldn't want to be guilty by association.
Anybody who claims that somebody is a "paid shill for Microsoft" simply because they disagree earns my instant disrespect. Why? Because some OS/2 fanatics claimed that of me because they couldn't believe that a cheap network card could halt the installation of the OS. Get over it -- not everybody who has a problem with Linux (or other M$-alternative product) is on the Microsoft payroll!
As much as I've tried since 1994 or so to install, regularly use, and even enjoy various distributions of Linux (primarily Slackware for the first 8 to 10 years), it does get very, very frustrating when seemingly-simple things just don't work. I'm not a fan of the dumbed-down attitude that everything on a computer should "just work" but unless you're building something from scratch (and I do mean from the ground up, not installing anything that anybody else has created), some things do need to "just work." Need to compile a kernel? You'll need your compiler to work. Expect to use a keyboard or mouse? You'll need your drivers to work. And so on...
Current highly-annoying flaws include the install/upgrade process of OpenSUSE 10.2 failing to enable X to start because it pointed to a non-existent file/link. (I fixed it manually, which was easy for someone with a bit of experience but would have completely stumped a novice, and is an unnecessary waste of time no matter how much experience you have. That this happened on two machines -- fresh install on a 32-bit machine, upgrade from OpenSUSE 10.0 with functioning X on a 64-bit machine -- indicates this wasn't exactly a fluke instance.) Also included is my (as-yet-unresolved) problem getting Matrox drivers to work, leaving me to stare in 1024x768 VESA mode at installation instructions that don't match the downloaded driver file (e.g., documented command line options that aren't actually available).
I haven't given up yet, but that's only because of my strong dislike for the alternative -- i.e., using Windows, which I'm still stuck doing far more than I would like. I still even recommend Linux to others, although I'm more inclined to add "to evaluate" or "to experiment with" than I was in the past. In the past, I was more prone to blaming my own lack of experience for any problems I ran into. And that's still the case sometimes; for example, I figure my inability to get high scores to save in games is probably something I'm missing, not necessarily a problem with the game or system. But now that I'm seeing specific, productivity-killing flaws that have nothing to do with my experience, and which are an apparent sign of basic sloppiness, I'm less enthused about Linux than I was. That is definitely a step in the wrong direction.
No, there's no exclusive agreement (at least not with Revver), but Revver gives me the ability to post on many different sites (plus sharing via P2P, email, FTP, IM, and/or whatever else) and still have one place to manage the videos (adding, deleting, checking earnings, etc.). I know it works, so I'm not too tempted to look elsewhere. As for YouTube specifically, I dislike it for enough reasons that it would take a *very* compelling offer for me to consider hosting videos there for revenue purposes.
Unless something significantly better comes along, I'm sticking with Revver. The pay has been decent so far for the relatively low effort I've put into it, and they have a history of respecting copyrights and rewarding creators, rather than a history of building audience by hosting copyright violations that ignore the rights of creators. Revver uses Creative Commons licensing, with some added terms to allow for appending an ad and supporting "affiliate" sharing. I can't imagine switching to YouTube, other than to create teasers that direct people over to my content on Revver.
I happen to agree with what Go Daddy did regardless of whether the information was already compromised or not. I'd be upset if someone got hold of my Slashdot password let alone the one to my blog or email.
So your personal feelings are more important than the rule of law upon which our entire society is based? Interesting example of short-sighted selfishness.
Hmm, I don't know about that. We saw some pretty effective city evacuation with Katrina. With a 40 minute warning, we could save, oh, I don't know, maybe tens, even dozens of people...
(And, of course, it wouldn't be too late at all for a retaliatory strike from mobile platforms.)
When I was still running the Open Music Registry, it used to annoy me greatly that articles online and off would refer to "legal music downloads" in a manner that implied the only way to legally download music was to pay for it. No reference to or acknowledgement of the public domain. No open-licensing. Just "pay or it's illegal."
Obviously that pet peeve is ripe for renewal on a different front: "legal" movie downloads. {sigh}
I had never heard of using a Dremel for this sort of thing until a week or two ago, when my wife went to help a family member carve some gourds for decorational use in a wedding. (Didn't work out, but that's beside the point.) She took my Dremel and I found out later -- one of my first concerns was whether it was all gummed up or not. She said it's fine, but I still need to verify that.:-/
Perhaps to ensure that there is "lots of software available" and "a strong developer base" for the platform for which one wishes to evangelize...?
And no, I didn't get through reading the article, because the "Macs rule, PCs drool" beginning of the interview turned me off entirely. The very premise of the first question was my first clue that annoyances lay ahead. I've never felt that I was facing a dearth of RSS reading/aggregating capabilities on my PC. (FWIW, my current RSS reader is my browser, i.e., Opera 7.)
Oh, I agree entirely. My original post was meant sarcastically, I wasn't even careful with my proofreading. I was surprised to see the "Insightful" moderation, and I'm hoping it was relevant to my sarcasm and not the idea of using the same name for both company and product! (Or maybe it was the Microsoft crash jibe, but hopefully not, that's rather petty to be considered "insightful.")
Having a flagship product named the same as the company name short-circuits this process for the clue-deficient. How many of has have heard their less-technically-literate people complain that their "Microsoft" crashed? (And of course, who among us would correct such an error, since it has such a nice ring to it...)
Even though it's old, I'd love to still get some kind of functionality from my old Fujitsu LifeBook 270DX. But none of the suggested ways to make "lemonade" will work on mine, because when it gave up the ghost, it really went down hard. Something in the video hardware went so awry that the machine won't boot at all -- it just goes immediately to a "your system is fried and you now have a fairly expensive doorstop" message. (Not in those words, of course.) I haven't looked at it in months, but I know I spent many, many hours trying to find a way past that. No luck, even after doing what "should" have disabled the display (i.e., to use a remote display).:-(
Not that most will care, but I first heard about Asterisk via the HTTP_REFERER data in the Web server logs for the OMR, which was apparently referenced as a place to get no-cost, pre-licensed (open licensed) on-hold music.
Now that the OMR has been shut down, the links to those songs are available in an XML dump of the music database that can be found on freality.org or my own site.
No, this is not a bleeding heart "what about the hungry" post... If we risk the assumption that funds are set aside in a budget for this and can only be used for this, wouldn't it be better to spend those funds on building a new email system and helping vendors provide easy migration to the new system? I think fighting spam is a lost cause as long as the technology allows it, and tacking on various odd bits to the technology doesn't really resolve the core problems.
If I have to suffer yet another misguided federal usage of my money, and it must be to hold our hands and try to fix our spam problems, then I'd rather know it was going toward a real solution, even if that just meant spending it on research into ways to build an email system that provides for impossibility of spam, cross-platform (and designed-to-be-safe) support for styled text and embedded images (i.e., "rich" documents), and protection of sender privacy (which may be at odds with preventing spam, thus the need for research rather than a slapdash quick fix).
(I take it from earlier posts that this is a dupe article so maybe it's pointless to post this here, but I'm bored this morning...
Is this not holding the Libertarian party and candidate(s) to a higher ideal than the rest of the US political scene? What was the "implementation plan" in the 20th Century to move people toward a "welfare state," in which they now will readily abandon personal responsibility and expect government (or businesses, or somebody else) to take care of them? Well, there was none, at least not unless you believe various conspiracy theories. The influences of various political groups can gradually rise (or fall), but until the impossible day that a person or political party can please "all the people, all the time" there will never be a relevant implementation plan for any large change. It takes time and gradual influence, not a President's game plan, to make major shifts. (Well, there are other scenarios for more drastic change, but the ones I can think of all require a more desperate situation, such as existed in various countries between WW I and WW II.)
In your opinion, is a National Missile Defense system folly, as some would say, and an example of corporate welfare through defense contracts, or is it "proven enough" to be a worthwhile expenditure of taxpayer funds as a necessary component of the defense of the nation?
The sense in which you are wrong is that a license is a different thing than copyright.
I never said they were the same thing, so I'm not sure how you could figure that I was "wrong" about that. Then again, logic doesn't seem to be your strong point, as further evidenced by your prior statement ("Then, there's a huge amount of public domain music from the demo scene. But the demo scene culture doesn't use licenses at all...") which implies that you think licensing or lack thereof will make or not make something public domain.
...relevance of demo scene to OMR... I dunno, can't see how that issue came into the conversation.
Because you brought it up. ("The issue is that OMR couldn't use music from the demo scene") You forgot what you wrote already? Sorry, I never would have responded if I'd realized you couldn't carry on an intelligent conversation. I don't normally waste time trying to refute half-baked assertions about complicated issues.
(About the licensing thing, uh, yeah, well, thanks, but first of all you're wrong and second of all even if you're weren't wrong it wouldn't be relevant. The issue is that OMR couldn't use music from the demo scene because most of that music is deliberately released without any documentation describing the licensing conditions.)
Well, that's an interesting left-field comment. First off, how am I wrong?
"The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U. S. law... Notice was required under the 1976 Copyright Act. This requirement was eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention, effective March 1, 1989."
US Copyright Office
If there's no requirement to post a copyright notice to avoid having something enter the public domain, there's obviously no requirement to post a license. Second, of what relevance is demo scene music to the OMR? Do you even know what the OMR was, or are you still speaking in ignorance? Who cares if the OMR couldn't use demo scene music -- that was never the goal of the OMR to begin with. That's like saying that Ford can't use Chevrolet parts -- would Ford really care? The OMR existed as a registry of specifically-licensed works, where the application of that license by the artist granted users of the audio the ability to use it in a wide (yet enumerated and not unlimited) variety of ways. It was not about downloading whatever you could get your hands on that wasn't obviously a copyright violation, which is apparently the MO of Webjay.
Well, basically, the problem all along still exists -- I don't have the time and energy to make it good. The code in it was pretty bad and needed a lot of work, then there was the liability issue, and other issues. I figured the best way to unload the burden of the OMR while still promoting the original interest was to make the data freely available (i.e., by posting an XML export on my site and in a relevant Usenet (binaries) newsgroup), so that someone else could take the data and use it with a better code base, better organization of personnel, etc.
The difference is in the scale of things. No flame intended, but Webjay knows about orders of magnitude more songs than OMR.
I see. So it would make sense for someone in China to say "almost nobody lives in California" because China has orders of magnitude more people than California? I think the key term is "knows about" -- versus ignorance. Someone from China might say that almost nobody lives in Bellevue, WA (USA), because they're ignorant about Bellevue. But that statement implies that you might have a hard time finding other people there, and I assure you that it's anything but remote or abandoned, it's quite a busy little city. As you say, no flame intended, but I think you are ignorant of how much open-licensed music is available -- even the OMR did not contain a comprehensive listing of it all, the OMR database itself was "ignorant" of much openly-licensed audio.
The hundreds of titles that were in the OMR may not look like much compared to what "Webjay knows about" but those hundreds, plus the hundreds (...? or thousands?) of other titles that were never listed in the OMR, can't logically be construed to be "almost nothing" any more than the population of California can logically be construed by the Chinese as being "almost nothing."
Then, there's a huge amount of public domain music from the demo scene. But the demo scene culture doesn't use licenses at all, usually -- people just post their music without a license.
If I'm reading that right, this implies a different sort of ignorance on your part. Posting something without a license does not imply it is in the public domain. If I post a song, photo, short story, etc. on my site, it is still protected by copyright law unless I specifically release it to the public domain (that is, until my copyright expires). There may be an implicit sharing license, but that is substantially different from the public domain.
Re:NYT promotes the *opposite* of filesharing
on
NYT Promotes File Sharing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's not quite right because almost none of this music is under a free or open license, though.
Hmm... what does "almost none" mean in this context? When I still had the OMR up and running, each of the hundreds of songs listed in it was under a very open license (the artist's choice from the Open Audio License or one of three similar licenses).
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think you're being clever? I can't imagine that anybody else would agree. What a monkey.
Gosh, I can just bet what your next "witty reply" will be... you'll call me a Microsoft shill! Woo hoo, how original and clever! /yawn/
At least it's good to know that my original assessment of you was accurate.
Ah, yes, thanks for reminding me why I abandoned Slashdot before. Trolls like you get +5 "Insightful" and legit commentary gets marked down as "Troll." That's what happens when you let the monkeys run the monkey house. Any moderator who isn't willfully out to trash Slashdot should be ashamed to have marked up your post, especially now that you've proven your trollfulness by posting the same response to every reply. Then again, recent experience gives me doubt that any such moderator exists. Glad I quit taking advantage of the opportunity to moderate; wouldn't want to be guilty by association.
Anybody who claims that somebody is a "paid shill for Microsoft" simply because they disagree earns my instant disrespect. Why? Because some OS/2 fanatics claimed that of me because they couldn't believe that a cheap network card could halt the installation of the OS. Get over it -- not everybody who has a problem with Linux (or other M$-alternative product) is on the Microsoft payroll!
As much as I've tried since 1994 or so to install, regularly use, and even enjoy various distributions of Linux (primarily Slackware for the first 8 to 10 years), it does get very, very frustrating when seemingly-simple things just don't work. I'm not a fan of the dumbed-down attitude that everything on a computer should "just work" but unless you're building something from scratch (and I do mean from the ground up, not installing anything that anybody else has created), some things do need to "just work." Need to compile a kernel? You'll need your compiler to work. Expect to use a keyboard or mouse? You'll need your drivers to work. And so on...
Current highly-annoying flaws include the install/upgrade process of OpenSUSE 10.2 failing to enable X to start because it pointed to a non-existent file/link. (I fixed it manually, which was easy for someone with a bit of experience but would have completely stumped a novice, and is an unnecessary waste of time no matter how much experience you have. That this happened on two machines -- fresh install on a 32-bit machine, upgrade from OpenSUSE 10.0 with functioning X on a 64-bit machine -- indicates this wasn't exactly a fluke instance.) Also included is my (as-yet-unresolved) problem getting Matrox drivers to work, leaving me to stare in 1024x768 VESA mode at installation instructions that don't match the downloaded driver file (e.g., documented command line options that aren't actually available).
I haven't given up yet, but that's only because of my strong dislike for the alternative -- i.e., using Windows, which I'm still stuck doing far more than I would like. I still even recommend Linux to others, although I'm more inclined to add "to evaluate" or "to experiment with" than I was in the past. In the past, I was more prone to blaming my own lack of experience for any problems I ran into. And that's still the case sometimes; for example, I figure my inability to get high scores to save in games is probably something I'm missing, not necessarily a problem with the game or system. But now that I'm seeing specific, productivity-killing flaws that have nothing to do with my experience, and which are an apparent sign of basic sloppiness, I'm less enthused about Linux than I was. That is definitely a step in the wrong direction.
No, there's no exclusive agreement (at least not with Revver), but Revver gives me the ability to post on many different sites (plus sharing via P2P, email, FTP, IM, and/or whatever else) and still have one place to manage the videos (adding, deleting, checking earnings, etc.). I know it works, so I'm not too tempted to look elsewhere. As for YouTube specifically, I dislike it for enough reasons that it would take a *very* compelling offer for me to consider hosting videos there for revenue purposes.
Unless something significantly better comes along, I'm sticking with Revver. The pay has been decent so far for the relatively low effort I've put into it, and they have a history of respecting copyrights and rewarding creators, rather than a history of building audience by hosting copyright violations that ignore the rights of creators. Revver uses Creative Commons licensing, with some added terms to allow for appending an ad and supporting "affiliate" sharing. I can't imagine switching to YouTube, other than to create teasers that direct people over to my content on Revver.
I happen to agree with what Go Daddy did regardless of whether the information was already compromised or not. I'd be upset if someone got hold of my Slashdot password let alone the one to my blog or email.
So your personal feelings are more important than the rule of law upon which our entire society is based? Interesting example of short-sighted selfishness.
Hmm, I don't know about that. We saw some pretty effective city evacuation with Katrina. With a 40 minute warning, we could save, oh, I don't know, maybe tens, even dozens of people...
(And, of course, it wouldn't be too late at all for a retaliatory strike from mobile platforms.)
When I was still running the Open Music Registry, it used to annoy me greatly that articles online and off would refer to "legal music downloads" in a manner that implied the only way to legally download music was to pay for it. No reference to or acknowledgement of the public domain. No open-licensing. Just "pay or it's illegal."
Obviously that pet peeve is ripe for renewal on a different front: "legal" movie downloads. {sigh}
But can you lick them and stick them together to build things, like you can with the corn starch packing peanuts? ;-)
(Licking used packing peanuts is not recommended. Just a little disclaimer for those not astute or sober enough to figure that out on their own!)
I had never heard of using a Dremel for this sort of thing until a week or two ago, when my wife went to help a family member carve some gourds for decorational use in a wedding. (Didn't work out, but that's beside the point.) She took my Dremel and I found out later -- one of my first concerns was whether it was all gummed up or not. She said it's fine, but I still need to verify that. :-/
Perhaps to ensure that there is "lots of software available" and "a strong developer base" for the platform for which one wishes to evangelize...?
And no, I didn't get through reading the article, because the "Macs rule, PCs drool" beginning of the interview turned me off entirely. The very premise of the first question was my first clue that annoyances lay ahead. I've never felt that I was facing a dearth of RSS reading/aggregating capabilities on my PC. (FWIW, my current RSS reader is my browser, i.e., Opera 7.)
Oh, I agree entirely. My original post was meant sarcastically, I wasn't even careful with my proofreading. I was surprised to see the "Insightful" moderation, and I'm hoping it was relevant to my sarcasm and not the idea of using the same name for both company and product! (Or maybe it was the Microsoft crash jibe, but hopefully not, that's rather petty to be considered "insightful.")
Heh, you need to get out more. ;-) Or just work a month or two in a tech support job (those were my "starving student" days).
Having a flagship product named the same as the company name short-circuits this process for the clue-deficient. How many of has have heard their less-technically-literate people complain that their "Microsoft" crashed? (And of course, who among us would correct such an error, since it has such a nice ring to it...)
Even though it's old, I'd love to still get some kind of functionality from my old Fujitsu LifeBook 270DX. But none of the suggested ways to make "lemonade" will work on mine, because when it gave up the ghost, it really went down hard. Something in the video hardware went so awry that the machine won't boot at all -- it just goes immediately to a "your system is fried and you now have a fairly expensive doorstop" message. (Not in those words, of course.) I haven't looked at it in months, but I know I spent many, many hours trying to find a way past that. No luck, even after doing what "should" have disabled the display (i.e., to use a remote display). :-(
Not that most will care, but I first heard about Asterisk via the HTTP_REFERER data in the Web server logs for the OMR, which was apparently referenced as a place to get no-cost, pre-licensed (open licensed) on-hold music.
Now that the OMR has been shut down, the links to those songs are available in an XML dump of the music database that can be found on freality.org or my own site.
No, this is not a bleeding heart "what about the hungry" post... If we risk the assumption that funds are set aside in a budget for this and can only be used for this, wouldn't it be better to spend those funds on building a new email system and helping vendors provide easy migration to the new system? I think fighting spam is a lost cause as long as the technology allows it, and tacking on various odd bits to the technology doesn't really resolve the core problems.
If I have to suffer yet another misguided federal usage of my money, and it must be to hold our hands and try to fix our spam problems, then I'd rather know it was going toward a real solution, even if that just meant spending it on research into ways to build an email system that provides for impossibility of spam, cross-platform (and designed-to-be-safe) support for styled text and embedded images (i.e., "rich" documents), and protection of sender privacy (which may be at odds with preventing spam, thus the need for research rather than a slapdash quick fix).
(I take it from earlier posts that this is a dupe article so maybe it's pointless to post this here, but I'm bored this morning...
Is this not holding the Libertarian party and candidate(s) to a higher ideal than the rest of the US political scene? What was the "implementation plan" in the 20th Century to move people toward a "welfare state," in which they now will readily abandon personal responsibility and expect government (or businesses, or somebody else) to take care of them? Well, there was none, at least not unless you believe various conspiracy theories. The influences of various political groups can gradually rise (or fall), but until the impossible day that a person or political party can please "all the people, all the time" there will never be a relevant implementation plan for any large change. It takes time and gradual influence, not a President's game plan, to make major shifts. (Well, there are other scenarios for more drastic change, but the ones I can think of all require a more desperate situation, such as existed in various countries between WW I and WW II.)
In your opinion, is a National Missile Defense system folly, as some would say, and an example of corporate welfare through defense contracts, or is it "proven enough" to be a worthwhile expenditure of taxpayer funds as a necessary component of the defense of the nation?
The sense in which you are wrong is that a license is a different thing than copyright.
I never said they were the same thing, so I'm not sure how you could figure that I was "wrong" about that. Then again, logic doesn't seem to be your strong point, as further evidenced by your prior statement ("Then, there's a huge amount of public domain music from the demo scene. But the demo scene culture doesn't use licenses at all...") which implies that you think licensing or lack thereof will make or not make something public domain.
Because you brought it up. ("The issue is that OMR couldn't use music from the demo scene") You forgot what you wrote already? Sorry, I never would have responded if I'd realized you couldn't carry on an intelligent conversation. I don't normally waste time trying to refute half-baked assertions about complicated issues.
Are you flaming me, Brother SnakeStu?
No, why? Are you hypersensitive?
(About the licensing thing, uh, yeah, well, thanks, but first of all you're wrong and second of all even if you're weren't wrong it wouldn't be relevant. The issue is that OMR couldn't use music from the demo scene because most of that music is deliberately released without any documentation describing the licensing conditions.)
Well, that's an interesting left-field comment. First off, how am I wrong?
If there's no requirement to post a copyright notice to avoid having something enter the public domain, there's obviously no requirement to post a license. Second, of what relevance is demo scene music to the OMR? Do you even know what the OMR was, or are you still speaking in ignorance? Who cares if the OMR couldn't use demo scene music -- that was never the goal of the OMR to begin with. That's like saying that Ford can't use Chevrolet parts -- would Ford really care? The OMR existed as a registry of specifically-licensed works, where the application of that license by the artist granted users of the audio the ability to use it in a wide (yet enumerated and not unlimited) variety of ways. It was not about downloading whatever you could get your hands on that wasn't obviously a copyright violation, which is apparently the MO of Webjay.
What's the real holdup?
Well, basically, the problem all along still exists -- I don't have the time and energy to make it good. The code in it was pretty bad and needed a lot of work, then there was the liability issue, and other issues. I figured the best way to unload the burden of the OMR while still promoting the original interest was to make the data freely available (i.e., by posting an XML export on my site and in a relevant Usenet (binaries) newsgroup), so that someone else could take the data and use it with a better code base, better organization of personnel, etc.
The difference is in the scale of things. No flame intended, but Webjay knows about orders of magnitude more songs than OMR.
I see. So it would make sense for someone in China to say "almost nobody lives in California" because China has orders of magnitude more people than California? I think the key term is "knows about" -- versus ignorance. Someone from China might say that almost nobody lives in Bellevue, WA (USA), because they're ignorant about Bellevue. But that statement implies that you might have a hard time finding other people there, and I assure you that it's anything but remote or abandoned, it's quite a busy little city. As you say, no flame intended, but I think you are ignorant of how much open-licensed music is available -- even the OMR did not contain a comprehensive listing of it all, the OMR database itself was "ignorant" of much openly-licensed audio.
The hundreds of titles that were in the OMR may not look like much compared to what "Webjay knows about" but those hundreds, plus the hundreds (...? or thousands?) of other titles that were never listed in the OMR, can't logically be construed to be "almost nothing" any more than the population of California can logically be construed by the Chinese as being "almost nothing."
Then, there's a huge amount of public domain music from the demo scene. But the demo scene culture doesn't use licenses at all, usually -- people just post their music without a license.
If I'm reading that right, this implies a different sort of ignorance on your part. Posting something without a license does not imply it is in the public domain. If I post a song, photo, short story, etc. on my site, it is still protected by copyright law unless I specifically release it to the public domain (that is, until my copyright expires). There may be an implicit sharing license, but that is substantially different from the public domain.
That's not quite right because almost none of this music is under a free or open license, though.
Hmm... what does "almost none" mean in this context? When I still had the OMR up and running, each of the hundreds of songs listed in it was under a very open license (the artist's choice from the Open Audio License or one of three similar licenses).