Way back when we were pissed off at the MPAA and their cohorts for not letting teens into certain movies even when said kids had parental permission (ah! how naive we were!), somebody here suggested that as an act of protest / subversion / obnoxious joke, we should each take a bunch of neighborhood kids to the movies.
Now, of course we know now that we can't in good conscience pay money to a movie theater. But the libraries are free, and similar tactics might be worhtwhile. The involvement of a kid as a pawn would add to poigniancy, perhaps, but it sort of demeans the kid:
Somebody put together a list of non-porn, inoffensive sites (like the blue-footed boobies site) that wind up getting blocked by various filters with common settings. Then, take the list, go to the library, and look for the page. when you can't find it, the fun begins! Talk to the librarians. Talk to the head librarian. Bring motions in town coincil meetings to make *single pages* exceptions to the filter. Do this constantly, for months at a time. Become the world's most-obnoxious-yet-perfectly-innocent seeker of information. Play dumb. Get what you want.
Now, this isn't the end itslef -- the filters are still the offenders in this -- but this will make the point, and if it doesn't, it'll at least piss off the bad guys. (of course, it'll bother the librarinas, too, so take it easy on them -- they'll be the first to come around when they see how poorly the filters work).
That's my manifesto for revolt of the day. Back to work.
OK, so you extoll the virtues of geek pride, but at the same time, you often deride certain types of techno-facinations.
So my question is, do you think that we'd all be better or worse off if everyone got a little geekier? Certainly, there would be an upside -- non-literate windows users might start to think again about how they relate to their pcs, we'd get a little more respect, and maybe things would get done more efficiently with fewer suits around.
But maybe things would get worse: should things technical be our primary focus? Do we need suits? I don't like them either, but I sure as hell don't to have to do the boring crap they do, either. Does the element which finds the workings of things dull and tough, who just wants to be the *user*, play an important role in society, or would be better off if we were all like us?
Certainly, this would decimate the insider-outsider aspect of geek cutlre. But what else do you think it would do? Do you want it? Is it even possible?
I don't see the relevance of MP3.com's intentions. In fact, there's really no need to guess at whether or not they "get it", they are motivated by profit, pure and simple, and that's ok -- they are, after all, a publicly-held corp.
With this in mind, the suit against the by the RIAA and their countersuit can still be relevant and worth our support/derision. Clearly, there are DeCSS-like issues here about ownership and use of pre-purchased information, and regardless of why MP3.com wants Beam It to succeed, we can support its success and preah its legality for reasons of our own.
In fact, however, I believe that if MP3.com doesn't get "it", they certainly get *something*. In fact, the very fact that they would implement Beam It technology, the fact that they would orient themselves towards providing a service rather than hoarding content, these facts show that they do understand how music marketing and information access is going to take place in the near future. That's more of an understanding than most companies have about the futures of their industries, and MP3.com is acting on it to the benefit of the consumer.
Are they doing it because they love me and want to be all warm and cuddly? I'm not an idiot, I know that's not true. But the fact is that they're acting in a way that furthers the flexibility and freedom with which I can access information. So they're ok by me.
Side note: they also own the domains mp4.com and, i think, mp5.com, just as a matter of trivia. someone mentioned mp4 up above.
Good point. Historically, lots of assaults on liberty have taken place gradually (although many have not, of course), and this is certainly a weakness in my approach -- it requires a lot more maintenance and has the potential to lead to other, less desirable circumstances.
Sorry, btw, I did that thing where I make it look like Im agreeing to disagree, and then attempt make it clear that I'm sure I'm right.
This is, of course, off topic, but I wanted to mention how much I've enjoyed this thread. Certainly the most intellegent conversation I've had all day, but then, I support a marketing company, so i guess i get what i deserve.
Well, this speaks to my most recent note, on the other thread here:
I think that you've always got to compromise --
I have to go to work everyday, but i have the freedom to go to france on vacation. Am i more or less free than someone without a job who never gets to leave downtown hartford 'cause he's broke?
That's a tough call, but your failure to recognize that there are competing freedoms here, where software is only one, is i think the source of our disagreement.
OK, I see your point. Any sacrifice on the open-ness of the functional pieces of software is a net loss because you can always rip them yourself.
The reason that I disagree with you on the general point is because I'm taking a slightly less focused stance on what 'freedom' and 'control' are here. The freedom to not have to rip cds is a freedom -- it saves me time, hd space, both things which I can spend better in other places. It 'frees' me from my pc's bandwidth issues, by letting me go through mp3.com, rather than my isp and then my crappy copper wire, which again saves me time. Clearly, this also frees me geographically.
I do understand where you're coming from, but freedom is about compromises -- sure, I'm free not to have a job, but am i sacrificing certain other freedoms (maybe more important, maybe less) if i decide to quit and be broke? This is a similar case from where I sit. The marginal decrease in my control over the processing of my own media is negligible compared to the other, larger ways that this frees me up in terms of mobility, storage space, and time.
Like I say, I agree with you when you say that this represents a certain loss of control over your own files and your access to them. My point is simply that you're not getting nothing in return for it, and in fact, i'm getting constant access to a lot of information that i might not have had such easy access to -- it's a win, net, by my conception. Our disagreement seems to be about whether this is a fair trade, whether what i'm talking about is in fact 'freedom' and 'control'.
I believe that in spite of the not-completely-open status of a particular piece of software, any piece, that software can still provide the means for an advancement of access to certain other, distinct type of information. In this case, the contents of any such hidden proprietary functionality is far less interesting to me than the contents of the mp3s themselves. Is this a sacrifice, then? Maybe, a little. But I think that this creates access to a lot more than it hides. With this in mind, it's ambiguous at best in terms of its relative freedom-fighting purposes.
Furthermore, I take issue with 'proprietary library'. In fact, the whole issue is that the CDs themselves *are* proprietary. The CDs aren't GPL'd. Therefore, *some* part of this process has *got* to be hidden from my view, or the entire thing becomes illegal, and not very nice. It's possible that a moral consequence of making this tool completely open would be the tool's elimination for perfactly valid legal reasons! That, i can say for sure, I don't want.
I was wondering how long it was going to take for MP3.com to do this -- given the fact that the Linux community tends towards a more zealous and open defense of the manner in which Beam-It approaches the issue of ownership of information, it really behooves them to support the OS.
Also, I'm amazed at what a bunch of bad-asses they're being. Lawuit filed, they didn't run and hide, they ramped up their advertising and encouraged people to sign up their friends. Sure, this is good for their business, but I'd like to believe that it also shows some sense of the politics of turning people onto the issues of ownership that this all raises.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but there seems to be a real understanding of the fact that their business is predicated on certain assumptions about who owns the music, and how they ought to be able to use it, that are pretty progressive.
First, I have top convince my MS-addicted friends that yes, there are such things as *spreadsheets* and *web browsers* for Linux. I find this gap in understanding amazing.
Then I have to convince them that, while some dists are very hard to install, others will hold your hand. This, to me, is a very valid concern from the point of view of Joe AOL and Marsha MS. [Ed: May not be actual people, but demeaning archetypes.] But there are answers here, too.
But it's very tough to come up with a satisfying response to the people who won't switch over until they can get some games. Games are as important, in terms of comforting the average user, as many other features they think about when they compare two oses (even when the comparison isn't accurate). The more games that get ported, the better it is for us, of course, and the better it is for the general acceptability of the os.
Of course, the trick is not to be as snobby as we sometimes are with regards to other issues. Sure, starcraft is the greatest rts game in history, and unreal the greatest fps, but those deer-hunting games sell. Point being, we should watch the snide remarks when Game Hunter XLVII gets ported, cause it's a stupid game, but it's indicative of the fact that Linux is winning market share, which, i think we can agree, is a good thing, relatively speaking.
I agree -- at the very least, the sony product is going to house your cable box, your digital vcr, your current game system, your dvd player, your web browser, and your email.
Re: $200, whoever laughed at you doesn't know much about his console history -- the original psx, or course, debuted at $350 bucks and now retails, 5 years later, at $99. It reached the $200 price point just 14 months after its release.
Peripherals are going to be a big deal -- I've read about the possibilities of a PDA, they've released plans for a HD to hit shelves in spring 2001, and this will definitely be the first console in many, many years for which I will actually purchase the keyboard and mouse.
Re: comparisons to other items-that-failed-to-replace-pcs, this is totally different. Did 12 year old kids whine until their parents bought them a pc on a chip or an All-In-One? Was there an installed base of 50 million of any of the predecessors of these machines?
I dunno. Maybe i'm just rooting for it cause i love gaming so much, but it genuinely seems to me that sony has taken a broad view in terms of what this machine can do and the ways that people are going to use it. If it does everything they say it does, they deserve to win, and i anticipate that 18 months from now, we'll all be pissed off because of how much control Sony and its set-top dynamo have over all of the information that enters and leaves our homes.
Suppose that, along with all of the proprietary dvd players for windows and mac, the DVD people (or some 3d party) had had enough foresight to see that a linux player would help them sell DVDs. Do you think that you (or anyone else) would have bothered to build the sort of decryption facility that you did if there had been a commercially available (but maybe not free) dvd player for linux?
More generally, we all have our own ideas about why reverse engineering takes place, usually a missing piece of tech, but are there any circumstances that specifically discourage this type of work? Will laws do it? What about companies being more comprehensive in providing support for various OSes?
The PSX2, as those of us who spend too much time thinking and talking about games are fond of mentioning, is going to be this monster of a machine.
If you want to talk about the future of porting games to linux, you really need to consider the next sony console as a primary source for the games. I know, i know, console games lack the depth and intellectual demands of pc games, bla bla bla, but that's all going to change, and quickly, with this machine.
I have no idea what the dev kit for the psx2 is like, and I don't know how often games get ported from a console to linux (ever?). But windows-to-Linux isn't the only porting that's going to go on, going forward. Which is nice.
I mean, i tend to be a bit paranoid about getting information from anywhere that has a profit motive at all, but that's just my own neurosis.
Still and all, Disney, I mean, they've got a pretty tremendous stake in controlling their own information, and a pretty bed reputation for throwing their weight around.
At the end of the day, I think that this issue is on the one hand really easy for the Information "Owners" to obfuscate, and on the other, one which, even when explained by someone unbiased, might be difficult for the lay-person to understand:
"See, it's not about *stealing*, it's about being able to access and use, legally, information I've purchased legally," says Joey Hacker.
"Umm, but you can still use it to copy dvds, right?," says my dad.
And my dad is partially right, but I doubt that ABC is going to take the time to explain the subtleties here, make him understand that Johansen did a legal thing to make use of info he'd already paid for, that exposed a weakness that *it's still illegal to exploit*.(what J.J. really ought to do is get some of the lawyers from the handgun industry -- DeCSS doesn't rip off the movie industry, people rip off the movie industry!).
Furthermore, I find it hard to imagine that ABC is going to touch on any of the freedom of information type issues, larger things, that are potentially at stake here.
I'm not sure that i'd call what i'm talking about anarchism, but i would certainly say that the more that the individual is able to be a self-sufficient entity, in terms of his access to information, the more power he'll have over corporate attempts to subvert his freedoms.
That is, by maintaining an understanding of what's involved in protecting privacy and freedom, you actually help to protect it -- the understanding of the act is the act itself, in a way. Hand in hand with this goes the ability to do things which would qualify as anarchistic, of course, but I don't know that you neccessarily have to do them.
if you'll look extra closely, you'll notice the appearance of the word 'government' in my post a whopping none times.
furthermore, you read 'our' as 'my' -- an error on your part which i can't really understand, given my reply. in fact, i made it quite clear in my original post that the 'our' refers to those who are well-informed enough *and* (to your accusations of laziness) inclined to do something about potential incursions against our intellectual freedoms. like as in 'us', on slashdot, for example.
in fact, OUR opinons, while no better or worse, are almost certainly more well-informed than those of the general public. which was, of course, my point. if, indeed, the technologically informed are more capable of perceiving certain types of dangers to the freedom of the general public, then it behooves us *and the public* to speak out about them, even in the case that what we say goes against the general wisdom. you suppose that every individual can perceive every danger to his freedoms, applying an egalitarian view of human intelligence which is at once naive and at the same time oddly, umm, leftist, considering the nature of the rest of your post.
that is, i'm glad that there are people to tell me about impending snow storms, and i feel that we here could be performing the same service regarding potential issues that involve technology and society.
finally, accusations of laziness seem silly in light of the fact that my post was a call to individual action.
point of story, i'm not sure which post you read, but mine was about individual power and responsibility, not wacky government conspiracies. In fact, it was sort of anti-those. Most everyone understood this, sorry if you didn't.
if you'll look extra closely, you'll notice the appearance of the word 'government' in my post a whopping none times.
furthermore, you read 'our' as 'my' -- an error on your part which i can't really understand, given my reply. in fact, i made it quite clear in my original post that the 'our' refers to those who are well-informed enough *and* (to your accusations of laziness) inclined to do something about potential incursions against our intellectual freedoms. like as in 'us', on slashdot, for example. in fact, OUR opinons, while no better or worse, are almost certainly more well-informed than those of the general public. which was, of course, my point.
finally, accusations of laziness seem silly in light of the fact that my post was a call to individual action.
point of story, i'm not sure which post you read, but mine was about individual power and responsibility, not wacky government conspiracies. In fact, it was sort of anti-those. Most everyone got it, i apologize if you didn't.
the thing of it is, when i said exercising our free will, i wasn't referring to everybody's, but to everybody who would like to see amazon own less than 100 % of their market. that makes me, katz, a reasonably-sized majority of this board, and a couple hundred thousand others, maybe.
but you've got everybody voting in the general election -- my mom, my boss, jeff bezos -- basically, tons of people who either don't notice or don't care that our options aren't as broad as we might like them to be, if there were a bunch of major players.
so, i agree, any successful but intellectually oppressive company can be dethroned, but only if its down-side is widely accepted, and people know what to do about it. which is where the letting people know part comes in.
So, no one on slashdot ever buys from amazon again. Fantastic, their profits drop off by 0.5 % because we all shop at fatbrain anyway (it's not like most of us were real big fans prior to the one-click suit). Jeff Bezos, I'm sure, is shaking in his boots.
If i sound frustrated, it's cause I am. From the point of view of responding to a capitalist threat by exercising our capitalistic free-will, you know, I don't see much promise. Those people interested in shopping in a morally or philosophically responsible fashion will always be outnumbered by those not willing or not informed enough to do so, especially in the case of technically or socially complicated issues. Other examples are things like electric cars and global warming -- in the case of supposedly conflicting evidence, and problems with the costs of safe alternatives, people just can't seem to care.
That said, i think that there is a tremendous moral imperative for any member of a community that does recognize and understand the problems to a) inform others, b) act passively to prevent the hegemonies and intellectual monopolies we're seeing, and c) act in a positive fashion to secure and develop the tools to make any attempt to unfairly or maliciously gain a stranglehold on our access to information.
So, a) and b) are straightforward -- we stop buyin from Amazon, and we make sure to bore our windows-using friends to death with how fast/efficient/empowering/etc. other OSes/browsers/applications/etc. are. I do these things already, much to the detriment of my social life.
The really important thing, however, is c). It's also the one that sounds dangerous, violent, and fun. It's like the role of the monks in Canticle for Liebowitz or the Foundation in those Asimov books. We're more capable than the average bears of discerning which tools, trends, and uses for information are (on the one hand) most important in terms of their relevance to our information-access-related freedoms, and (on the other) most in danger of encroachment by industry, whether due to lawsuit, or good, old-fashioned suffocation-by-conglomoration.
That is to say, if DVD decryption tools had been squashed by the court prior to their dissemination to the community, well, the industry has won. If we all study and understand the code first, though, they can pass as many laws as they want, but they will fail to encroach upon our right to understand their technology, to understand and adapt any technology. This, I think, is the important thing, in spite of any lawsuit.
Point of story, what the people who break things open are really doing isn't destructive or criminal, it's a natural consequence of human curiousity. And the key way to nullify any attempt to limit this sort of curious inquiry is simply to exercise it at every opportunity. If we know a thing, and understand it, we own it, in a manner that the lawsuits and conglomorates will always lag behind.
I guess I'm trying to reinforce the degree to which I think that this is a great crusade for us, against intellectual limitation, because it's a fight that seems perfectly catered to the things we already enjoy -- learning things, busting them up and reusing the pieces however we'd like. These are subversive acts, I think that most of us discovered this at a very young age, but I think that understanding that this still applies is very important now that there are these potential threats to our ability to own our information and code and processes and stuff.
Those are my thoughts. I'm sure that I've made them sound pretentious and overblown, when I mean to make them sound populist and grass-roots. Fight the power via learning stuff, and knowing stuff. It sounds like fun to me.
This article really got at the coolest part, which is the fact that the playstation 2 is going to supplant about 7 other devices, and put sony, which also owns a whole lot of content, in a position to own its whole digital distribution process, from the moment that a movie camera starts rolling to when people watch the movie in their homes.In truth, I think that the PSX2 is only going to deliver marginally better graphics and sound than the dreamcast (which is, as they say, the bomb). But it's going to win because it's capacity as a game console isn't nearly as impressive as its ability to act as a set-top digital content delivery platform.I don't agree, however, with the notion that consoles are trying to get a piece of what desktop pc's have. Slashdot audiences notwithstanding, most Americans don't spend hours staring vacuously into their monitors, they spend hours staring vacuously into their tvs. In their capacities as information delivery devices, the consoles in question provide an entirely different, more passive sort of entertainment than PCs, which is what people want, sadly.
this sounds a lot like ms has just endowed a 2d media lab, only without the possibility of intellectual cross-training the likes of which the current media lab gets from being a) multi-sponsored and b) truly multi-disciplinary.if MS was genuinely interested in doing anything other than getting a bunch of student slaves and protecting intellectual property, they would have endowed the media lab, which exists for exactly the purpose stated here. only problem, of course, is that they wouldn't be able to enforce their precious NDAs.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a thought:
Way back when we were pissed off at the MPAA and their cohorts for not letting teens into certain movies even when said kids had parental permission (ah! how naive we were!), somebody here suggested that as an act of protest / subversion / obnoxious joke, we should each take a bunch of neighborhood kids to the movies.
Now, of course we know now that we can't in good conscience pay money to a movie theater. But the libraries are free, and similar tactics might be worhtwhile. The involvement of a kid as a pawn would add to poigniancy, perhaps, but it sort of demeans the kid:
Somebody put together a list of non-porn, inoffensive sites (like the blue-footed boobies site) that wind up getting blocked by various filters with common settings. Then, take the list, go to the library, and look for the page. when you can't find it, the fun begins! Talk to the librarians. Talk to the head librarian. Bring motions in town coincil meetings to make *single pages* exceptions to the filter. Do this constantly, for months at a time. Become the world's most-obnoxious-yet-perfectly-innocent seeker of information. Play dumb. Get what you want.
Now, this isn't the end itslef -- the filters are still the offenders in this -- but this will make the point, and if it doesn't, it'll at least piss off the bad guys. (of course, it'll bother the librarinas, too, so take it easy on them -- they'll be the first to come around when they see how poorly the filters work).
That's my manifesto for revolt of the day. Back to work.
Jon,
OK, so you extoll the virtues of geek pride, but at the same time, you often deride certain types of techno-facinations.
So my question is, do you think that we'd all be better or worse off if everyone got a little geekier? Certainly, there would be an upside -- non-literate windows users might start to think again about how they relate to their pcs, we'd get a little more respect, and maybe things would get done more efficiently with fewer suits around.
But maybe things would get worse: should things technical be our primary focus? Do we need suits? I don't like them either, but I sure as hell don't to have to do the boring crap they do, either. Does the element which finds the workings of things dull and tough, who just wants to be the *user*, play an important role in society, or would be better off if we were all like us?
Certainly, this would decimate the insider-outsider aspect of geek cutlre. But what else do you think it would do? Do you want it? Is it even possible?
I don't see the relevance of MP3.com's intentions. In fact, there's really no need to guess at whether or not they "get it", they are motivated by profit, pure and simple, and that's ok -- they are, after all, a publicly-held corp.
With this in mind, the suit against the by the RIAA and their countersuit can still be relevant and worth our support/derision. Clearly, there are DeCSS-like issues here about ownership and use of pre-purchased information, and regardless of why MP3.com wants Beam It to succeed, we can support its success and preah its legality for reasons of our own.
In fact, however, I believe that if MP3.com doesn't get "it", they certainly get *something*. In fact, the very fact that they would implement Beam It technology, the fact that they would orient themselves towards providing a service rather than hoarding content, these facts show that they do understand how music marketing and information access is going to take place in the near future. That's more of an understanding than most companies have about the futures of their industries, and MP3.com is acting on it to the benefit of the consumer.
Are they doing it because they love me and want to be all warm and cuddly? I'm not an idiot, I know that's not true. But the fact is that they're acting in a way that furthers the flexibility and freedom with which I can access information. So they're ok by me.
Side note: they also own the domains mp4.com and, i think, mp5.com, just as a matter of trivia. someone mentioned mp4 up above.
Good point. Historically, lots of assaults on liberty have taken place gradually (although many have not, of course), and this is certainly a weakness in my approach -- it requires a lot more maintenance and has the potential to lead to other, less desirable circumstances.
:) take it easy.
Sorry, btw, I did that thing where I make it look like Im agreeing to disagree, and then attempt make it clear that I'm sure I'm right.
Gotta go hand out some flyers
This is, of course, off topic, but I wanted to mention how much I've enjoyed this thread. Certainly the most intellegent conversation I've had all day, but then, I support a marketing company, so i guess i get what i deserve.
Well, this speaks to my most recent note, on the other thread here:
I think that you've always got to compromise --
I have to go to work everyday, but i have the freedom to go to france on vacation. Am i more or less free than someone without a job who never gets to leave downtown hartford 'cause he's broke?
That's a tough call, but your failure to recognize that there are competing freedoms here, where software is only one, is i think the source of our disagreement.
OK, I see your point. Any sacrifice on the open-ness of the functional pieces of software is a net loss because you can always rip them yourself.
The reason that I disagree with you on the general point is because I'm taking a slightly less focused stance on what 'freedom' and 'control' are here. The freedom to not have to rip cds is a freedom -- it saves me time, hd space, both things which I can spend better in other places. It 'frees' me from my pc's bandwidth issues, by letting me go through mp3.com, rather than my isp and then my crappy copper wire, which again saves me time. Clearly, this also frees me geographically.
I do understand where you're coming from, but freedom is about compromises -- sure, I'm free not to have a job, but am i sacrificing certain other freedoms (maybe more important, maybe less) if i decide to quit and be broke? This is a similar case from where I sit. The marginal decrease in my control over the processing of my own media is negligible compared to the other, larger ways that this frees me up in terms of mobility, storage space, and time.
Like I say, I agree with you when you say that this represents a certain loss of control over your own files and your access to them. My point is simply that you're not getting nothing in return for it, and in fact, i'm getting constant access to a lot of information that i might not have had such easy access to -- it's a win, net, by my conception. Our disagreement seems to be about whether this is a fair trade, whether what i'm talking about is in fact 'freedom' and 'control'.
Does this clarify my point?
I think that you're sort of missing my point.
I believe that in spite of the not-completely-open status of a particular piece of software, any piece, that software can still provide the means for an advancement of access to certain other, distinct type of information. In this case, the contents of any such hidden proprietary functionality is far less interesting to me than the contents of the mp3s themselves. Is this a sacrifice, then? Maybe, a little. But I think that this creates access to a lot more than it hides. With this in mind, it's ambiguous at best in terms of its relative freedom-fighting purposes.
Furthermore, I take issue with 'proprietary library'. In fact, the whole issue is that the CDs themselves *are* proprietary. The CDs aren't GPL'd. Therefore, *some* part of this process has *got* to be hidden from my view, or the entire thing becomes illegal, and not very nice. It's possible that a moral consequence of making this tool completely open would be the tool's elimination for perfactly valid legal reasons! That, i can say for sure, I don't want.
I was wondering how long it was going to take for MP3.com to do this -- given the fact that the Linux community tends towards a more zealous and open defense of the manner in which Beam-It approaches the issue of ownership of information, it really behooves them to support the OS.
Also, I'm amazed at what a bunch of bad-asses they're being. Lawuit filed, they didn't run and hide, they ramped up their advertising and encouraged people to sign up their friends. Sure, this is good for their business, but I'd like to believe that it also shows some sense of the politics of turning people onto the issues of ownership that this all raises.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but there seems to be a real understanding of the fact that their business is predicated on certain assumptions about who owns the music, and how they ought to be able to use it, that are pretty progressive.
First, I have top convince my MS-addicted friends that yes, there are such things as *spreadsheets* and *web browsers* for Linux. I find this gap in understanding amazing.
Then I have to convince them that, while some dists are very hard to install, others will hold your hand. This, to me, is a very valid concern from the point of view of Joe AOL and Marsha MS. [Ed: May not be actual people, but demeaning archetypes.] But there are answers here, too.
But it's very tough to come up with a satisfying response to the people who won't switch over until they can get some games. Games are as important, in terms of comforting the average user, as many other features they think about when they compare two oses (even when the comparison isn't accurate). The more games that get ported, the better it is for us, of course, and the better it is for the general acceptability of the os.
Of course, the trick is not to be as snobby as we sometimes are with regards to other issues. Sure, starcraft is the greatest rts game in history, and unreal the greatest fps, but those deer-hunting games sell. Point being, we should watch the snide remarks when Game Hunter XLVII gets ported, cause it's a stupid game, but it's indicative of the fact that Linux is winning market share, which, i think we can agree, is a good thing, relatively speaking.
I agree -- at the very least, the sony product is going to house your cable box, your digital vcr, your current game system, your dvd player, your web browser, and your email.
Re: $200, whoever laughed at you doesn't know much about his console history -- the original psx, or course, debuted at $350 bucks and now retails, 5 years later, at $99. It reached the $200 price point just 14 months after its release.
Peripherals are going to be a big deal -- I've read about the possibilities of a PDA, they've released plans for a HD to hit shelves in spring 2001, and this will definitely be the first console in many, many years for which I will actually purchase the keyboard and mouse.
Re: comparisons to other items-that-failed-to-replace-pcs, this is totally different. Did 12 year old kids whine until their parents bought them a pc on a chip or an All-In-One? Was there an installed base of 50 million of any of the predecessors of these machines?
I dunno. Maybe i'm just rooting for it cause i love gaming so much, but it genuinely seems to me that sony has taken a broad view in terms of what this machine can do and the ways that people are going to use it. If it does everything they say it does, they deserve to win, and i anticipate that 18 months from now, we'll all be pissed off because of how much control Sony and its set-top dynamo have over all of the information that enters and leaves our homes.
More generally, we all have our own ideas about why reverse engineering takes place, usually a missing piece of tech, but are there any circumstances that specifically discourage this type of work? Will laws do it? What about companies being more comprehensive in providing support for various OSes?
The PSX2, as those of us who spend too much time thinking and talking about games are fond of mentioning, is going to be this monster of a machine.
If you want to talk about the future of porting games to linux, you really need to consider the next sony console as a primary source for the games. I know, i know, console games lack the depth and intellectual demands of pc games, bla bla bla, but that's all going to change, and quickly, with this machine.
I have no idea what the dev kit for the psx2 is like, and I don't know how often games get ported from a console to linux (ever?). But windows-to-Linux isn't the only porting that's going to go on, going forward. Which is nice.
This was exactly my thought.
I mean, i tend to be a bit paranoid about getting information from anywhere that has a profit motive at all, but that's just my own neurosis.
Still and all, Disney, I mean, they've got a pretty tremendous stake in controlling their own information, and a pretty bed reputation for throwing their weight around.
At the end of the day, I think that this issue is on the one hand really easy for the Information "Owners" to obfuscate, and on the other, one which, even when explained by someone unbiased, might be difficult for the lay-person to understand:
"See, it's not about *stealing*, it's about being able to access and use, legally, information I've purchased legally," says Joey Hacker.
"Umm, but you can still use it to copy dvds, right?," says my dad.
And my dad is partially right, but I doubt that ABC is going to take the time to explain the subtleties here, make him understand that Johansen did a legal thing to make use of info he'd already paid for, that exposed a weakness that *it's still illegal to exploit*.(what J.J. really ought to do is get some of the lawyers from the handgun industry -- DeCSS doesn't rip off the movie industry, people rip off the movie industry!).
Furthermore, I find it hard to imagine that ABC is going to touch on any of the freedom of information type issues, larger things, that are potentially at stake here.
I'm not sure that i'd call what i'm talking about anarchism, but i would certainly say that the more that the individual is able to be a self-sufficient entity, in terms of his access to information, the more power he'll have over corporate attempts to subvert his freedoms.
That is, by maintaining an understanding of what's involved in protecting privacy and freedom, you actually help to protect it -- the understanding of the act is the act itself, in a way. Hand in hand with this goes the ability to do things which would qualify as anarchistic, of course, but I don't know that you neccessarily have to do them.
wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute --
if you'll look extra closely, you'll notice the appearance of the word 'government' in my post a whopping none times.
furthermore, you read 'our' as 'my' -- an error on your part which i can't really understand, given my reply. in fact, i made it quite clear in my original post that the 'our' refers to those who are well-informed enough *and* (to your accusations of laziness) inclined to do something about potential incursions against our intellectual freedoms. like as in 'us', on slashdot, for example.
in fact, OUR opinons, while no better or worse, are almost certainly more well-informed than those of the general public. which was, of course, my point. if, indeed, the technologically informed are more capable of perceiving certain types of dangers to the freedom of the general public, then it behooves us *and the public* to speak out about them, even in the case that what we say goes against the general wisdom. you suppose that every individual can perceive every danger to his freedoms, applying an egalitarian view of human intelligence which is at once naive and at the same time oddly, umm, leftist, considering the nature of the rest of your post.
that is, i'm glad that there are people to tell me about impending snow storms, and i feel that we here could be performing the same service regarding potential issues that involve technology and society.
finally, accusations of laziness seem silly in light of the fact that my post was a call to individual action.
point of story, i'm not sure which post you read, but mine was about individual power and responsibility, not wacky government conspiracies. In fact, it was sort of anti-those. Most everyone understood this, sorry if you didn't.
wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute --
if you'll look extra closely, you'll notice the appearance of the word 'government' in my post a whopping none times.
furthermore, you read 'our' as 'my' -- an error on your part which i can't really understand, given my reply. in fact, i made it quite clear in my original post that the 'our' refers to those who are well-informed enough *and* (to your accusations of laziness) inclined to do something about potential incursions against our intellectual freedoms. like as in 'us', on slashdot, for example. in fact, OUR opinons, while no better or worse, are almost certainly more well-informed than those of the general public. which was, of course, my point.
finally, accusations of laziness seem silly in light of the fact that my post was a call to individual action.
point of story, i'm not sure which post you read, but mine was about individual power and responsibility, not wacky government conspiracies. In fact, it was sort of anti-those. Most everyone got it, i apologize if you didn't.
You're right, and I can only say that I fell victim to my desire to sound unequivocal, passionate, etc.
A world in which we only had fatbrain wouldn't be much better, for the vary same reasons that lead one to mistrust amazon or ms.
Yes and no --
the thing of it is, when i said exercising our free will, i wasn't referring to everybody's, but to everybody who would like to see amazon own less than 100 % of their market. that makes me, katz, a reasonably-sized majority of this board, and a couple hundred thousand others, maybe.
but you've got everybody voting in the general election -- my mom, my boss, jeff bezos -- basically, tons of people who either don't notice or don't care that our options aren't as broad as we might like them to be, if there were a bunch of major players.
so, i agree, any successful but intellectually oppressive company can be dethroned, but only if its down-side is widely accepted, and people know what to do about it. which is where the letting people know part comes in.
So, no one on slashdot ever buys from amazon again. Fantastic, their profits drop off by 0.5 % because we all shop at fatbrain anyway (it's not like most of us were real big fans prior to the one-click suit). Jeff Bezos, I'm sure, is shaking in his boots.
If i sound frustrated, it's cause I am. From the point of view of responding to a capitalist threat by exercising our capitalistic free-will, you know, I don't see much promise. Those people interested in shopping in a morally or philosophically responsible fashion will always be outnumbered by those not willing or not informed enough to do so, especially in the case of technically or socially complicated issues. Other examples are things like electric cars and global warming -- in the case of supposedly conflicting evidence, and problems with the costs of safe alternatives, people just can't seem to care.
That said, i think that there is a tremendous moral imperative for any member of a community that does recognize and understand the problems to a) inform others, b) act passively to prevent the hegemonies and intellectual monopolies we're seeing, and c) act in a positive fashion to secure and develop the tools to make any attempt to unfairly or maliciously gain a stranglehold on our access to information.
So, a) and b) are straightforward -- we stop buyin from Amazon, and we make sure to bore our windows-using friends to death with how fast/efficient/empowering/etc. other OSes/browsers/applications/etc. are. I do these things already, much to the detriment of my social life.
The really important thing, however, is c). It's also the one that sounds dangerous, violent, and fun. It's like the role of the monks in Canticle for Liebowitz or the Foundation in those Asimov books. We're more capable than the average bears of discerning which tools, trends, and uses for information are (on the one hand) most important in terms of their relevance to our information-access-related freedoms, and (on the other) most in danger of encroachment by industry, whether due to lawsuit, or good, old-fashioned suffocation-by-conglomoration.
That is to say, if DVD decryption tools had been squashed by the court prior to their dissemination to the community, well, the industry has won. If we all study and understand the code first, though, they can pass as many laws as they want, but they will fail to encroach upon our right to understand their technology, to understand and adapt any technology. This, I think, is the important thing, in spite of any lawsuit.
Point of story, what the people who break things open are really doing isn't destructive or criminal, it's a natural consequence of human curiousity. And the key way to nullify any attempt to limit this sort of curious inquiry is simply to exercise it at every opportunity. If we know a thing, and understand it, we own it, in a manner that the lawsuits and conglomorates will always lag behind.
I guess I'm trying to reinforce the degree to which I think that this is a great crusade for us, against intellectual limitation, because it's a fight that seems perfectly catered to the things we already enjoy -- learning things, busting them up and reusing the pieces however we'd like. These are subversive acts, I think that most of us discovered this at a very young age, but I think that understanding that this still applies is very important now that there are these potential threats to our ability to own our information and code and processes and stuff.
Those are my thoughts. I'm sure that I've made them sound pretentious and overblown, when I mean to make them sound populist and grass-roots. Fight the power via learning stuff, and knowing stuff. It sounds like fun to me.
This article really got at the coolest part, which is the fact that the playstation 2 is going to supplant about 7 other devices, and put sony, which also owns a whole lot of content, in a position to own its whole digital distribution process, from the moment that a movie camera starts rolling to when people watch the movie in their homes.In truth, I think that the PSX2 is only going to deliver marginally better graphics and sound than the dreamcast (which is, as they say, the bomb). But it's going to win because it's capacity as a game console isn't nearly as impressive as its ability to act as a set-top digital content delivery platform.I don't agree, however, with the notion that consoles are trying to get a piece of what desktop pc's have. Slashdot audiences notwithstanding, most Americans don't spend hours staring vacuously into their monitors, they spend hours staring vacuously into their tvs. In their capacities as information delivery devices, the consoles in question provide an entirely different, more passive sort of entertainment than PCs, which is what people want, sadly.
this sounds a lot like ms has just endowed a 2d media lab, only without the possibility of intellectual cross-training the likes of which the current media lab gets from being a) multi-sponsored and b) truly multi-disciplinary.if MS was genuinely interested in doing anything other than getting a bunch of student slaves and protecting intellectual property, they would have endowed the media lab, which exists for exactly the purpose stated here. only problem, of course, is that they wouldn't be able to enforce their precious NDAs.