You don't need to worry about getting sued by the RIAA or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many indie (unsigned) musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans - here's mine and
my friends The Divine Maggees.
If everyone started downloading legal music instead, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs from indie bands, and seeing their shows, instead of enriching the major labels every time you buy a Britney or New Kids CD. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads are not copyright violations because the artists give you permission to download them.
Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com . See especially their
genre index . Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.
Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet ?
The Open Directory Project has
Bands and Artists and
Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.
Monotonik provides BitTorrents with zip files containing 60 to 100 MP3s apiece available
here.
If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free
Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites
here . Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.
There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See
Furthur Network and konspire[2b].
Unfortunately, musicians are often not very good website designers, so poor usability is a significant obstacle to getting music directly from artists' websites. If you're a musician, and you'd like to know how you can improve your website so more people will download your music, please read my article
If Indie Musicians Wanted Their Music Heard....
Finally, there is the problem of finding the music that's actually worth listening to. The labels do serve the (somewhat) legitimate purpose of picking out the good from the bad. But we can do that ourselves with legal downloads by using collaborative filtering, for example by downloading our music with iRATE, which you'll find at
While he wasn't talking about music, in discussing the need for free documentation, RMS makes a distinction between software and prose writing by supporting the idea that one ought to be able to forbid expressions of opinion from being altered. From
Free Software and Free Manuals:
As a general rule, I don't believe that it is essential for people to have permission to modify all sorts of articles and books. The issues for writings are not necessarily the same as those for software. For example, I don't think you or I are obliged to give permission to modify articles like this one, which describe our actions and our views.
Thus you commonly see opinion pieces written by RMS posted on the net, in which he gives permission to make only verbatim copies of what he wrote. I do the same in
Is This the America I Love?.
However, this has caused friction with the Debian community, because they feel that the fact that the GNU Free Documentation License provides for Invariant Sections and mandatory Cover Texts makes it non-free. They're working on a policy statement to this effect, and getting ready to move all the GFDL'ed documentation from main to non-free. You can find out more about that in
Why You Shouldn't Use the GNU FDL.
I observed some of the debate between the Debian developers and RMS on the debian-legal list, and while there are other significant issues, the main sticking point seemed to come down to whether or not political activism had any place in technical documentation. You can imagine Stallman's position on that. I come from way before "Open Source" was ever heard of, so I personally share Stallman's position.
It's an issue for me because I have some articles
which use the GFDL, so I discussed the issue at some length in
Which License for Free Documentation? The followup discussion has been very helpful.
Now why is this relevant to music?
The issue of whether it is moral (from Stallman's perspective) to forbid alteration of a work I believe comes down to whether the work is primarily functional in nature, or expressive of a personal opinion. The obvious utility of software, and the ability to combine code from different packages into new programs tips the balance heavily towards the side that says one must allow software to be altered. But that's not so clear with writing, which may be either unexpressive technical documentation, or impassioned political expression.
Music is much more like writing than software. Someone who is not a musician might not see it this way, but I feel that my music is an expression of my opinion. I can well see that there is other music that could not possibly be considered that way, and so I would support Stallman's position that not only copying but modification of such music must be permitted.
However, I don't think Stallman has completely thought this through when considering music explicitly. Have a look at his piece
Regarding Gnutella.
I have considered offerring a more permissive license to my songs, but one reason I don't is that I feel a more effective way to promote my music is to require downloads to only be on my own website. That way people can get to know me as a whole person and not just hear one song out of context.
I realize there is little I can do to stop someone from cheating, but I expect that as long as I'm providing the downloads, most people will respect my wishes.
I feel it is important to maintain the proprietary copyright and proprietary licensing to my music because it is something that I feel to be a deep expression of who I am. I don't think it's the same as software at all, and in fact I do try to contribute to Free Software when I can, for example by writing about how to create better Free Software as well as by contributing to Free Software projects.
If, say, RedHat were to come out with a copylefted music download service, and lots of people started providing altered versions of my music, I would feel personally violated. It's not simply that I want to keep all the money my music might ever generate.
However, there are people who do as you request, who write, record and distribute Free-as-in-Freedom music. I have read about them online, but I'm afraid I don't know where to find any. Perhaps someone who does can post a link in response.
I have another at Kuro5hin but the server doesn't seem to be working right now. Check the Op-Ed section for "Reflections on Independence Day" where I discuss how the Bush administration is getting ready to murder the P.O.W.'s at Guantanamo Bay.
I'm getting ready to move to Canada by the way. I can do that because my wife is a Canadian citizen. When I get there, I'm going to make it a priority to move somewhere I can get broadband - it's much more widely available there than in the U.S. When I do, I'm going to set up a FreeNet node and give it a 80 gig hard drive or so.
And sometime soon I should be mirroring my essays at a server physically located in Holland. Or Sealand if I can find someone who will host a small site - I can't afford their charge for a colo.
I think the whole debate over music piracy will be solved if everyone just started downloading legal music. One reason for that is that the RIAA would then shortly become bankrupt, because we'll all be listening to garage bands instead of Brittney and New Kids.
Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com. See especially their
genre index. Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.
Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet?
The Open Directory Project has
Bands and Artists and
Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.
If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free
Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites
here. Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.
There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See
Furthur Network and konspire[2b].
I'm sure if more people availed themselves of the wide variety of music available for free download, we will make short work of both the RIAA and ClearChannel. Our lives would also be richer for it.
Why violate copyright? Many musicians offer legal downloads of their music from their websites or from music hosting services. While you won't find many big-name bands offerring free downloads, you can get a wide variety of enjoyable music.
I'm one of those indie musicians that offers free downloads of my music so more people can get to know it. Please download and enjoy:
I wrote "Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel" not realizing that the 2.4 release was just a couple days away. I was very surprised at that.
I protested the release of 2.4, saying its inclusion in distros would cause users to unknowingly run a poor quality kernel, but Linus said the reason he wanted it released was so that it would get more widespread testing.
The "stable" branch of the kernel is perhaps misnamed. Linus gets to release a new kernel whenever he wants, and I imagine he does some testing, but I don't think he puts a stable release through any kind of rigourous qualification, I think it's more like when the complaints about his pre- versions die down a little.
I know it's common for Linus to release stable kernels that are actually quite broken on some non-x86 architectures. People who run Linux on PowerPC use a branch that's extensively patched from Linus' releases.
Both the 2.4 and 2.2 kernels went through a number of releases before they were really usable. I think the reason 2.2 became reliable was that it was smaller and simpler, and fewer people were working on it.
I'm pretty sure a good part of the reason behind the establishment of the Open Source Development Lab and their hiring of prominent kernel developers like Linus and Andrew Morton is to make sure that 2.6 actually does turn out to be enterprise quality. IBM is a big backer of OSDL, and I don't think they want the billion dollar investment in Linux in general to go to waste.
Back around when 2.4 was released I wrote a couple articles about how to help test the kernel. They are also helpful when evaluating a new kernel for production systems - you should never just run even a stable kernel on a production system, for while it may work OK for everyone else, it may not work for you.
I am looking for translations into other languages for all my
Linux Quality Database articles - there are other articles on web application quality and C++ programming, and more will be posted from time to time.
They are all under the GNU Free Documentation License, but for reasons explained in
Which License for Free Documentation? I am planning to change the license soon to another one.
Dell forbids U.S. purchasers to export Dell products from the U.S. The customer has to agree not to transport a Dell product outside the U.S., or else Dell will not sell you a unit. That means you're not allowed to take your Dell laptop on a business trip with you to a foreign country.
While air travelers can bring SARS with them halfway around the globe in hours, they can't bring their Dell laptop. Not legally anyway - Dell customers have a contractual obligation not to do so.
I don't know if that's still the case, but it was when I decided against purchasing a Dell so I could work during a long trip to Canada. I lived in California at the time.
Compaq, on the other hand, will not service a U.S. purchased unit outside the U.S. I was very happy doing my development on my
Compaq Presario 1800T while living in Newfoundland the year of my wedding, but the unit failed and I had to send it back for service.
Good thing I had a recent backup.
First, Compaq Canada wouldn't service it because, although Compaq sells Presarios in Canada, they didn't sell that model. They connected me to the U.S. support center.
The U.S. support center wouldn't accept shipment from Canada, not even if I paid the shipping. There was no question of them expediting me a shipping container and getting it picked up after I packed my laptop. They simply said it had to be shipped from within the U.S.
Newfoundland is a long way from anywhere in the U.S. While it is geographically considered part of North America, it is actually an island separated from the mainland by a seven-hour ferry ride. Air travel to the U.S. from Newfoundland is quite expensive.
What I did was ask my client very nicely to FedEx me a check, paying me in advance for work I hadn't done yet, then I bought a brand-new Pentium III box from a screwdriver shop in St. John's. I restored my backup onto it and continued work until my next trip to the U.S., several months later.
I finally brought my dead Compaq to my parents' when I visited them for thanksgiving, in the U.S. Only then would Compaq agree to repair my laptop. But I had to fly back to Canada before Compaq returned it. They wouldn't return it to Canada either - they sent it to my parents' house. Then I had to ask my mom to FedEx me the laptop. FedExing a laptop is expensive.
The icing on the cake was that although Compaq had agreed to do a warranty repair, they said I voided my warranty by installing Windows NT, BeOS and Linux on it - the Presario came with Win98. They charged me $400 for a new motherboard.
They did so just as the dot-com crash started to affect my consulting business. It took several months for me to raise the money for the repair, during which my dead laptop was stored in Compaq's repair facility. They telephoned me periodically to ask about the money, and each time I said I was working on it.
Then, when I finally sent them their damn check, they asked for my authorization to "rebrick" my laptop. They wanted to erase my hard drive and put a factory-fresh Win98 installation on it. I had lots of files (not my development work) that weren't backed up. I didn't give them permission, but was very anxious until I got the laptop shipped by my mom, with my files, Windows NT, Linux and BeOS still intact.
By the time I was able to pay for the repair, I'd moved back to the U.S., to Maine. But they wouldn't ship to anywhere but the address the laptop came from. So my mom had to FedEx the laptop from Washington to Maine.
I will never, ever purchase a Compaq product again.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Anyone around here remember the 60's, or am I the only old fart here?
There was this thing called the generation gap. Old people didn't understand the youth of the day, and the youth didn't care much for the old people. Ever heard the slogan "never trust anyone over 30?" The book and movie "Logan's Run" was about a society where everyone died when they were thirty.
The Beatles were controversial because they had long hair. Lots of people thought rock music was evil. My father didn't allow it in the house when my sister and I were young (I was a small child in the 60's). The evils of rock music were even debated in Congress. I read once that some young people were arrested in the soviet union for doing the twist.
Back then it was rock music and long hair. Now it's black clothes and videogames.
Youth will always be troubled for one reason or another. That's part of what it means to be young. Old people will always try to find something to blame it on.
A couple books worth reading
on
SARS Contained
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There are a couple of books worth reading to help understand the problem of emerging diseases. The shorter, somewhat sensationalistic one is The Hot Zone. The author characterizes the human race, when considering the availability of global airline travel, as a trillion pounds of meat just waiting for a virus.
A much better, more informative book, also much longer, is Lauri Garrett's The Coming Plague. I believe it won the Pulitzer. I had the pleasure of hearing Ms. Garrett speak at the Capitola Book Cafe - she graduated from nearby UC Santa Cruz.
I later heard Ms. Garrett speak on the radio regarding public health. She said a survey found that a majority of Americans, when asked, said that they were opposed to public health.
(They were confused, and the confusion is unfortunate. The US doesn't have publicly funded medical care like Canada does, but public health is the reason the nation isn't swept with plagues every couple years. Things like mass vaccination, sewer treatment, mosquito abatement and the like. Americans are too dimwitted to know that that's what public health means.)
Both books talk quite a bit about Ebola, and The Hot Zone describes an event when a bunch of research monkeys were imported to the U.S. that were infected with an Ebola-like virus.
I have a question about the Mandrake Club. I'm interested in trying Mandrake out. But the best net connection I'm able to obtain is a 56k dialup. Believe me - I've tried to find better, but the next faster option is $800/month frame relay.
Can Mandrake Club members get their software on CDs? Others have pointed out that Mandrake gets more of the money from club members than from retail box sales.
I actually downloaded the Slackware 8 installation ISO over my modem, because I was in such a hurry to install it. I used a box running slackware 7.1 to download it, connected directly to my modem without using my NAT box or anything, didn't do any other network activity besides the FTP, and got the iso without error. But the download took 3 days!
There was a lot of excitement over Linux and open source at the time RedHat had its IPO.
A friend of mine told me that at the time of the IPO, the stock prices of other, completely unrelated companies whose names also started with an "R" enjoyed a brief boost in stock price.
Apparently some investors were eager to get in on the gold rush, but were unclear on just who it was that was selling this Linux thing, and bought stock in other companies whose names started in R.
My friend thought this was happening in large part because Linux was praised so highly, while the ignorant investors thought RedHat (or whatever its name was) was the only place you could get Linux from.
Indie means "independent". A musician who's not signed with a record label.
As for myself, the way I recorded Geometric Visions was to borrow a portable 4-track studio recorder and a couple mikes from my friend Pete Burnight. I recorded all of my practicing for a couple weeks, then gave the tapes of the best pieces to Pete. He mixed the pieces for me and made my master tape.
I think it came out pretty well, but it's very homemade. Besides downloading the MP3s, the only way to get my album so far is for me to copy a tape for you. At some point I plan to make a CD master and have some duplicated, but I haven't got around to it yet.
Of course you're right, when considering the typical slashdot reader. But graphics, 3D modelling, scientific, CAD and so forth are not what your department secretary needs such a powerful machine for.
Blinking the cursor in Microsoft Word is almost certainly an integer operation. I think it's vitally important for the user to understand whether he would get better performance in this, the most common of end-user computer tasks, on a 3 GHz Dell Xeon or a 3 GHz 64-bit G5.
Don't feel so bad for being afraid to quit your job. I consulted off and on for eight years before committing to do it full-time.
What I did was consult for a little while in between perm jobs, or do consulting work on nights and weekends while I had perm jobs. That gave me an opportunity to learn the ropes with less risk.
What finally convinced me to take the plunge was that I was good and sick of working for somebody else. If I'd had any sense I would have stuck it out longer while getting myself in a better position to do consulting sustainably. But I just couldn't take it anymore. Having to survive by my own wits was the kick in my pants I needed to overcome a long period of burnout.
Refer to my comment further down in the discussion where I talk about being a consultant, and how I said it's crazy sometimes.
The biggest mistake I made when I became a consultant was to not learn about business before I took the plunge, and to not adequately take care of my business once I committed to it.
I became a consultant because I was a good programmer, wanted to be my own boss and wanted to work out of my home, not because I had any love of or aptitude for business. The importance of taking care of business has been a hard lesson to learn.
There is bookkeeping, accounting (two related but different things), tax filing, sales, marketing, contract negotations, billing, and, uh "encouraging" the client to actually pay, collections when that doesn't work, and time management.
None of these come naturally to most geeks, not even when you're a skilled and talented programmer.
I guess this Dave guy just tossed an Open Source project out into the wild and expected the checks to start appearing in his mailbox. Even under the best circumstances, it's much more complicated than that.
I started my consulting business full-time on April 1, 1998. I'm only just beginning to get a handle on the business issues.
You know, I've lived in the woods of Maine for two and a half years, and I lived in Newfoundland for 8 months before that. While there is some computer work in both places, there isn't much. I didn't have any.
The way I have been getting by is working as a consultant for remote clients. I also did it for a couple years before I moved away from California. Now, it's more difficult than holding a regular job, and it's not secure, but it has many advantages, one of which is that you can live in a nice place - for example, Not In Silicon Valley.
I'm sorry to see the LRP die. I subscribed to the list around the time I moved to Maine, and I think they're a great bunch of people. But I don't believe that there's no way that one can make a living in programming anymore.
If I can do it from Maine, he can do it from Florida.
Since I left California, I haven't had any clients from anywhere near where I lived. They've been from Kansas, New Jersey, The Bahamas, California, and Ontario. Just last week I got inquiries from Germany and Taiwan.
It's certainly not easy, in fact it's downright crazy sometimes, but I have been working steadily throughout the economic downturn, I still own my house, and I eat more or less regularly.
I wanted to fix something in my hack "FWDemo" before submitting it to the CD, but I didn't realize they were going to dupe them at the conference, so it didn't make it on.
FWDemo wasn't really meant to be a brilliant hack, so much as to be sample code for my talk on device drivers. But I didn't have a proper hack, so I showed off FWDemo.
(What it does is use a kernel extension to work around OS X' exclusive hardware access policy, to do a little SCSI I/O to a mounted FireWire disk via SBP2. To be safe, it just does an inquiry, but you can use your imagination to do more creative things.)
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone started downloading legal music instead, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs from indie bands, and seeing their shows, instead of enriching the major labels every time you buy a Britney or New Kids CD. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads are not copyright violations because the artists give you permission to download them.
Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com . See especially their genre index . Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.
Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet ?
The Open Directory Project has Bands and Artists and Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.
There are better sites for hosting MP3s than MP3.com. Some of them allow you to buy the band's CD from the same page as the MP3 download. Among them are The Internet Underground Music Archives, CDBaby, Epitonic.com, Lulu, SoundClick, Matador Records and insound .
Monotonik provides BitTorrents with zip files containing 60 to 100 MP3s apiece available here.
If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites here . Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.
There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See Furthur Network and konspire[2b] .
Unfortunately, musicians are often not very good website designers, so poor usability is a significant obstacle to getting music directly from artists' websites. If you're a musician, and you'd like to know how you can improve your website so more people will download your music, please read my article If Indie Musicians Wanted Their Music Heard....
Finally, there is the problem of finding the music that's actually worth listening to. The labels do serve the (somewhat) legitimate purpose of picking out the good from the bad. But we can do that ourselves with legal downloads by using collaborative filtering, for example by downloading our music with iRATE, which you'll find at
However, this has caused friction with the Debian community, because they feel that the fact that the GNU Free Documentation License provides for Invariant Sections and mandatory Cover Texts makes it non-free. They're working on a policy statement to this effect, and getting ready to move all the GFDL'ed documentation from main to non-free. You can find out more about that in Why You Shouldn't Use the GNU FDL.
I observed some of the debate between the Debian developers and RMS on the debian-legal list, and while there are other significant issues, the main sticking point seemed to come down to whether or not political activism had any place in technical documentation. You can imagine Stallman's position on that. I come from way before "Open Source" was ever heard of, so I personally share Stallman's position.
It's an issue for me because I have some articles which use the GFDL, so I discussed the issue at some length in Which License for Free Documentation? The followup discussion has been very helpful.
Now why is this relevant to music?
The issue of whether it is moral (from Stallman's perspective) to forbid alteration of a work I believe comes down to whether the work is primarily functional in nature, or expressive of a personal opinion. The obvious utility of software, and the ability to combine code from different packages into new programs tips the balance heavily towards the side that says one must allow software to be altered. But that's not so clear with writing, which may be either unexpressive technical documentation, or impassioned political expression.
Music is much more like writing than software. Someone who is not a musician might not see it this way, but I feel that my music is an expression of my opinion. I can well see that there is other music that could not possibly be considered that way, and so I would support Stallman's position that not only copying but modification of such music must be permitted.
However, I don't think Stallman has completely thought this through when considering music explicitly. Have a look at his piece Regarding Gnutella.
To bad I don't have any of them around anymore. That was a longer time ago than I would care to admit (see my sig).
Inkjets and laser printers just don't present the kinds of opportunities that inkjets and line printers did.
I realize there is little I can do to stop someone from cheating, but I expect that as long as I'm providing the downloads, most people will respect my wishes.
I feel it is important to maintain the proprietary copyright and proprietary licensing to my music because it is something that I feel to be a deep expression of who I am. I don't think it's the same as software at all, and in fact I do try to contribute to Free Software when I can, for example by writing about how to create better Free Software as well as by contributing to Free Software projects.
If, say, RedHat were to come out with a copylefted music download service, and lots of people started providing altered versions of my music, I would feel personally violated. It's not simply that I want to keep all the money my music might ever generate.
However, there are people who do as you request, who write, record and distribute Free-as-in-Freedom music. I have read about them online, but I'm afraid I don't know where to find any. Perhaps someone who does can post a link in response.
-
Is This the America I Love?
-
Impeach Bush
- DeCSS - Content Scrambling System Decryption
I have another at Kuro5hin but the server doesn't seem to be working right now. Check the Op-Ed section for "Reflections on Independence Day" where I discuss how the Bush administration is getting ready to murder the P.O.W.'s at Guantanamo Bay.I'm getting ready to move to Canada by the way. I can do that because my wife is a Canadian citizen. When I get there, I'm going to make it a priority to move somewhere I can get broadband - it's much more widely available there than in the U.S. When I do, I'm going to set up a FreeNet node and give it a 80 gig hard drive or so.
And sometime soon I should be mirroring my essays at a server physically located in Holland. Or Sealand if I can find someone who will host a small site - I can't afford their charge for a colo.
Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com. See especially their genre index. Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.
Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet?
The Open Directory Project has Bands and Artists and Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.
Better sites for hosting MP3's than MP3.com are Epitonic.com and insound.
If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites here. Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.
There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See Furthur Network and konspire[2b].
I'm sure if more people availed themselves of the wide variety of music available for free download, we will make short work of both the RIAA and ClearChannel. Our lives would also be richer for it.
I'm one of those indie musicians that offers free downloads of my music so more people can get to know it. Please download and enjoy:
-
Geometric Visions
It's a recording of me playing my piano compositions.Yes, it is still possible to get work without recruiters. And it has the same fresh clean taste as air does when you quit smoking.
When you're done reading that, read Fighting Age Discrimination and Buzzword Bingo in the Software Industry.
Thank you for your attention.
I protested the release of 2.4, saying its inclusion in distros would cause users to unknowingly run a poor quality kernel, but Linus said the reason he wanted it released was so that it would get more widespread testing.
The "stable" branch of the kernel is perhaps misnamed. Linus gets to release a new kernel whenever he wants, and I imagine he does some testing, but I don't think he puts a stable release through any kind of rigourous qualification, I think it's more like when the complaints about his pre- versions die down a little.
I know it's common for Linus to release stable kernels that are actually quite broken on some non-x86 architectures. People who run Linux on PowerPC use a branch that's extensively patched from Linus' releases.
Both the 2.4 and 2.2 kernels went through a number of releases before they were really usable. I think the reason 2.2 became reliable was that it was smaller and simpler, and fewer people were working on it.
I'm pretty sure a good part of the reason behind the establishment of the Open Source Development Lab and their hiring of prominent kernel developers like Linus and Andrew Morton is to make sure that 2.6 actually does turn out to be enterprise quality. IBM is a big backer of OSDL, and I don't think they want the billion dollar investment in Linux in general to go to waste.
-
Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel -
Japanese
-
Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
-
Japanese
The Open Source Development Lab's Japanese facility was kind enough to provide the Japanese translations.I am looking for translations into other languages for all my Linux Quality Database articles - there are other articles on web application quality and C++ programming, and more will be posted from time to time.
They are all under the GNU Free Documentation License, but for reasons explained in Which License for Free Documentation? I am planning to change the license soon to another one.
While air travelers can bring SARS with them halfway around the globe in hours, they can't bring their Dell laptop. Not legally anyway - Dell customers have a contractual obligation not to do so.
I don't know if that's still the case, but it was when I decided against purchasing a Dell so I could work during a long trip to Canada. I lived in California at the time.
Compaq, on the other hand, will not service a U.S. purchased unit outside the U.S. I was very happy doing my development on my Compaq Presario 1800T while living in Newfoundland the year of my wedding, but the unit failed and I had to send it back for service.
Good thing I had a recent backup.
First, Compaq Canada wouldn't service it because, although Compaq sells Presarios in Canada, they didn't sell that model. They connected me to the U.S. support center.
The U.S. support center wouldn't accept shipment from Canada, not even if I paid the shipping. There was no question of them expediting me a shipping container and getting it picked up after I packed my laptop. They simply said it had to be shipped from within the U.S.
Newfoundland is a long way from anywhere in the U.S. While it is geographically considered part of North America, it is actually an island separated from the mainland by a seven-hour ferry ride. Air travel to the U.S. from Newfoundland is quite expensive.
What I did was ask my client very nicely to FedEx me a check, paying me in advance for work I hadn't done yet, then I bought a brand-new Pentium III box from a screwdriver shop in St. John's. I restored my backup onto it and continued work until my next trip to the U.S., several months later.
I finally brought my dead Compaq to my parents' when I visited them for thanksgiving, in the U.S. Only then would Compaq agree to repair my laptop. But I had to fly back to Canada before Compaq returned it. They wouldn't return it to Canada either - they sent it to my parents' house. Then I had to ask my mom to FedEx me the laptop. FedExing a laptop is expensive.
The icing on the cake was that although Compaq had agreed to do a warranty repair, they said I voided my warranty by installing Windows NT, BeOS and Linux on it - the Presario came with Win98. They charged me $400 for a new motherboard.
They did so just as the dot-com crash started to affect my consulting business. It took several months for me to raise the money for the repair, during which my dead laptop was stored in Compaq's repair facility. They telephoned me periodically to ask about the money, and each time I said I was working on it.
Then, when I finally sent them their damn check, they asked for my authorization to "rebrick" my laptop. They wanted to erase my hard drive and put a factory-fresh Win98 installation on it. I had lots of files (not my development work) that weren't backed up. I didn't give them permission, but was very anxious until I got the laptop shipped by my mom, with my files, Windows NT, Linux and BeOS still intact.
By the time I was able to pay for the repair, I'd moved back to the U.S., to Maine. But they wouldn't ship to anywhere but the address the laptop came from. So my mom had to FedEx the laptop from Washington to Maine.
I will never, ever purchase a Compaq product again.
When you're done with that, visit Michael Moore's homepage.
Moore's Bowling for Columbine won an Oscar for Best Documentary.
Anyone around here remember the 60's, or am I the only old fart here?
There was this thing called the generation gap. Old people didn't understand the youth of the day, and the youth didn't care much for the old people. Ever heard the slogan "never trust anyone over 30?" The book and movie "Logan's Run" was about a society where everyone died when they were thirty.
The Beatles were controversial because they had long hair. Lots of people thought rock music was evil. My father didn't allow it in the house when my sister and I were young (I was a small child in the 60's). The evils of rock music were even debated in Congress. I read once that some young people were arrested in the soviet union for doing the twist.
Back then it was rock music and long hair. Now it's black clothes and videogames.
Youth will always be troubled for one reason or another. That's part of what it means to be young. Old people will always try to find something to blame it on.
A much better, more informative book, also much longer, is Lauri Garrett's The Coming Plague. I believe it won the Pulitzer. I had the pleasure of hearing Ms. Garrett speak at the Capitola Book Cafe - she graduated from nearby UC Santa Cruz.
I later heard Ms. Garrett speak on the radio regarding public health. She said a survey found that a majority of Americans, when asked, said that they were opposed to public health.
(They were confused, and the confusion is unfortunate. The US doesn't have publicly funded medical care like Canada does, but public health is the reason the nation isn't swept with plagues every couple years. Things like mass vaccination, sewer treatment, mosquito abatement and the like. Americans are too dimwitted to know that that's what public health means.)
Both books talk quite a bit about Ebola, and The Hot Zone describes an event when a bunch of research monkeys were imported to the U.S. that were infected with an Ebola-like virus.
Can Mandrake Club members get their software on CDs? Others have pointed out that Mandrake gets more of the money from club members than from retail box sales.
I actually downloaded the Slackware 8 installation ISO over my modem, because I was in such a hurry to install it. I used a box running slackware 7.1 to download it, connected directly to my modem without using my NAT box or anything, didn't do any other network activity besides the FTP, and got the iso without error. But the download took 3 days!
A friend of mine told me that at the time of the IPO, the stock prices of other, completely unrelated companies whose names also started with an "R" enjoyed a brief boost in stock price.
Apparently some investors were eager to get in on the gold rush, but were unclear on just who it was that was selling this Linux thing, and bought stock in other companies whose names started in R.
My friend thought this was happening in large part because Linux was praised so highly, while the ignorant investors thought RedHat (or whatever its name was) was the only place you could get Linux from.
As for myself, the way I recorded Geometric Visions was to borrow a portable 4-track studio recorder and a couple mikes from my friend Pete Burnight. I recorded all of my practicing for a couple weeks, then gave the tapes of the best pieces to Pete. He mixed the pieces for me and made my master tape.
I think it came out pretty well, but it's very homemade. Besides downloading the MP3s, the only way to get my album so far is for me to copy a tape for you. At some point I plan to make a CD master and have some duplicated, but I haven't got around to it yet.
I have four MP3s of me playing my piano compositions:
-
Geometric Visions
(I'm afraid there are some artifacts in Recursion - I'm going to have to re-digitize it from the analog master tape I have.)I will have Ogg Vorbis as soon as I find the time to encode the files.
Enjoy!
Blinking the cursor in Microsoft Word is almost certainly an integer operation. I think it's vitally important for the user to understand whether he would get better performance in this, the most common of end-user computer tasks, on a 3 GHz Dell Xeon or a 3 GHz 64-bit G5.
What I did was consult for a little while in between perm jobs, or do consulting work on nights and weekends while I had perm jobs. That gave me an opportunity to learn the ropes with less risk.
What finally convinced me to take the plunge was that I was good and sick of working for somebody else. If I'd had any sense I would have stuck it out longer while getting myself in a better position to do consulting sustainably. But I just couldn't take it anymore. Having to survive by my own wits was the kick in my pants I needed to overcome a long period of burnout.
The biggest mistake I made when I became a consultant was to not learn about business before I took the plunge, and to not adequately take care of my business once I committed to it.
I became a consultant because I was a good programmer, wanted to be my own boss and wanted to work out of my home, not because I had any love of or aptitude for business. The importance of taking care of business has been a hard lesson to learn.
There is bookkeeping, accounting (two related but different things), tax filing, sales, marketing, contract negotations, billing, and, uh "encouraging" the client to actually pay, collections when that doesn't work, and time management.
None of these come naturally to most geeks, not even when you're a skilled and talented programmer.
I guess this Dave guy just tossed an Open Source project out into the wild and expected the checks to start appearing in his mailbox. Even under the best circumstances, it's much more complicated than that.
I started my consulting business full-time on April 1, 1998. I'm only just beginning to get a handle on the business issues.
The way I have been getting by is working as a consultant for remote clients. I also did it for a couple years before I moved away from California. Now, it's more difficult than holding a regular job, and it's not secure, but it has many advantages, one of which is that you can live in a nice place - for example, Not In Silicon Valley.
I'm sorry to see the LRP die. I subscribed to the list around the time I moved to Maine, and I think they're a great bunch of people. But I don't believe that there's no way that one can make a living in programming anymore.
If I can do it from Maine, he can do it from Florida.
Since I left California, I haven't had any clients from anywhere near where I lived. They've been from Kansas, New Jersey, The Bahamas, California, and Ontario. Just last week I got inquiries from Germany and Taiwan.
If you want to know how I find clients, read Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants, How to Promote Your Business on the Internet and You Can Help by Referring Clients.
It's certainly not easy, in fact it's downright crazy sometimes, but I have been working steadily throughout the economic downturn, I still own my house, and I eat more or less regularly.
And I live in a nice place.
Maybe they'll still use MacHack.com - that's where everyone's going to be looking anyway.
After I rest up, look for FWDemo here.
FWDemo wasn't really meant to be a brilliant hack, so much as to be sample code for my talk on device drivers. But I didn't have a proper hack, so I showed off FWDemo.
(What it does is use a kernel extension to work around OS X' exclusive hardware access policy, to do a little SCSI I/O to a mounted FireWire disk via SBP2. To be safe, it just does an inquiry, but you can use your imagination to do more creative things.)