Uh, but DRM also protects the smaller authors who would be happy to eke out a comfortable life. If the books can only be free, then people can only write books as a hobby. That means only rich people can write books.
I like free sites. I want them to continue. Therefore it is my job to sustain their business model. If I like a business I need to support it or at least not try to get their services for free.
People who are in the top percentage of wealth concentration benefit the most from public spending.
Oh really? Then you follow immediately with the example of the roads. A dude in a $1000 beater gets as much use out of a road as someone driving an $300k+ Maserati. The soldiers defend all of us pretty much equally. (Yea, I know this isn't exactly true, but it's pretty close.)
Amazon isn't contributing anything to the local economy? Huh? When they employ people, those people pay plenty of taxes. In some states, they aren't sales taxes, but the employees still pay income and property tax.
Plus, why should Amazon collect taxes in the state where the purchaser lives? If anything, the delivery of that object depends much more on the infrastructure of the state holding the warehouse and the states in between.
Trust me. California is making plenty of money from the salaries that UPS pays the delivery team. They just want to add an additional 10% on top of everything because they can't stop taxing.
Sure and I want leather seats and a massage when I read it.
While I think every place would love to provide all of these features, I think you have to be realistic. ANd believe me, you're going to have to be realistic because a number of newspapers are going to go out of business and you're going to be stuck with Jerry's Sub Shop and Blog-o-matic. When Jerry's not waiting on his sandwich customers, he'll report the news he hears. And then let's see if Jerry has the time to beg you to read his blog.
"Who's going to pay for TV?" Answer: people who want more than what you can get in a model that is completely reliant on ad revenue. If your customer is the advertiser, then you are beholden to the advertiser. If your customer is an individual who pays then you have some independence.
Peter Wayner gave a talk at Google about helping to pay for shoe leather several years ago:
This is the major problem with the free-only ecology. A friend of mine sat me down when I first started writing a book and explained that it was a very different process than writing a long, long magazine article. The newspapers and magazines, he explained, have two loyalties: the subscribers and the advertisers. Both pay the bills. The job for a newspaper or magazine writer is to attract the kind of audience that will make the advertisers happy.
A book, however, is sold directly to the reader. The writer's loyalty is to the audience first and last. There's no complicated dance with an advertiser. That's why books continue to be the preferred ways for someone who really has a strong message to deliver. It's a medium built for Anne Coulters, the Dan Browns and the Popes. There's no editorial hand wringing or demands for "balance" to get in the way. There's a very tight feedback loop.
The free information ecology is the exact opposite. The same picky consumer who could make book authors dance has very little leverage over the free ecology. The free economy can only be dominated by those who get their rent money from other sources. Sometimes this won't affect their writing, but many times it will. The problem is that the free ecology doesn't have the feedback loop. The reader doesn't have the same leverage with the creator. Sometimes it may work out well, but in most cases, the creator will take care of the one who pays the bills first. It's just how the world has to work.
I'm an Internet user. I'm entitled to EVERYTHING FOR FREE!!!!!
I'm sorry. I wish that ad revenue could support the news business, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. The Internet has lead to a proliferation of advertising opportunities and it's all supply and demand. Companies like Facebook are going to be able to clean the clocks of major newspapers because Facebook users create the content for free and don't need any share of the ad revenue. Newspapers have to pay the salaries of reporters.
So if professional writers can't compete in the ad biz, they need to charge for their work. I'm not happy about paying, but I would rather pay than go without professional news. I'll still love the bloggers, but there are somethings that require some professional staff.
If you're talking about the Free Internet Press, I think you're dreaming about your contribution to society. One article I read is pure copyright infringement. There's a short notice at the end offering people to read the original story in a different "context." BS. You're worse than a link farm. You're a thief.
I've always liked the way to hide information in a list of things. Peter Wayner wrote a Java thingee that starts with a list of top disco songs. Talk about ambiguous. Any order would make sense. But you can use any list.
Here's my favorites:
Barry White: Barry White's Greatest Hits (20th Century, 1975)
KC & The Sunshine Band: KC & The Sunshine Band (TK, 1975)
Gregg Diamond Bionic Boogie: Hot Butterfly (Polydor, 1978)
The Jimmy Castor Bunch: Butt Of Course (Atlantic, 1974)
Silver Convention: Save Me (Midland International, 1975)
Voyage: Voyage; Fly Away (Marlin, 1978)
First Choice: Delusions (Gold Mind, 1977)
Beautiful Bend: Beautiful Bend (Marlin, 1978)
Candi Staton: Young Hearts Run Free (Warner Bros., 1976)
Loleatta Holloway: Loleatta (Gold Mind/Salsoul, 1976)
Trammps: The Trammps (Golden Fleece/CBS, 1975)
Giorgio Moroder: From Here to Eternity (Casablanca, 1985)
Cerrone: Love In C Minor (Cotillion, 1977)
Santa Esmeralda: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (Casablanca, 1977)
Chic: Chic (Atlantic, 1977)
Taana Gardner: Taana Gardner (West End, 1979)
LaBelle: Nightbirds (Epic, 1974)
B.T. Express: Do It ('Til You're Satisfied) (Roadshow, 1974)
Salsoul Orchestra: The Salsoul Orchestra (Salsoul, 1975)
Michael Zager Band: Let's All Chant (Private Stock, 1977)
Donna Summer: The Donna Summer Anthology (Casablanca/Chronicles, 1993)
Linda Clifford: If My Friends Could See Me Now (Curtom, 1978)
Direct Current: Direct Current (TEC Records, 1979)
Cloud One: Atmosphere Strutt (P&P, 1976)
Gloria Gaynor: Never Can Say Goodbye (MGM, 1975)
Kano: Kano (Emergency, 1980)
France Joli: France Joli (Prelude, 1979)
Village People: Village People (Casablanca, 1977)
Diana Ross: The Boss (Motown, 1979)
Tantra: The Double Album (Importe/12, 1980)
Cerrone: Cerrone 3 - Supernature (Cotillion, 1978)
Hamilton Bohannon: Summertime Groove (Mercury, 1978)
Love And Kisses: Love And Kisses (Casablanca, 1977)
Ashford & Simpson: So So Satisfied; Send It (Warner Bros., 1977)
Isaac Hayes: Chocolate Chip (HBS, 1975)
Love Unlimited: Under The Influence Of . . . (20th Century, 1973)
Disco-Tex & The Sex-O-Lettes: Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes (Chelsea, 1975)
Kool & The Gang: Wild And Peaceful (De-Lite, 1973)
Sister Sledge: We Are Family (Cotillion, 1979)
Sylvester: Step II (Fantasy, 1978)
Change: The Glow Of Love (Warner Bros./RFC, 1980)
Sister Sledge: Circle Of Love (Cotillion, 1975)
Grace Jones: Portfolio (Island, 1977)
Well, yes, you can't trust the client. But there's a big advantage if you can run the validation code there before the person runs submit. That saves the load on your server and it makes everything more responsive for the user. (Javascript, no matter how slow, is usually faster than a roundtrip on the Internet.)
But still you can verify on the server too-- another argument for running the same code on the server and the client.
Well, yes. It depends upon how you structure your code. If you're using a strict MVC paradigm, it often doesn't make much sense to do anything but the V at the client.
But I've also built some math tools. After I got the first version running on the server, someone suggested moving it to the client because the client has plenty of spare cycles. SO i rewrote it in Javascript.
Also, it can be useful if you write a fairly sophisticated filtering function to make sure that someone doesn't input the wrong answer. You can run it on the client, but it might make sense to run it at the server at other times. If you can move them back and forth, then everything is consistent. (If the Javascript versions agree!:0)
Well, yes, I love strict typing too. But hey, Java on the client isn't dominant. It often makes sense to run the same code on the server and the client. You can move code from the server to the client if you need to. And share code too.
Now if only all of the Javascript implementations agreed on a stable definition....
And there's also Tracemonkey from the Firefox crowd. I forgot that one. And heck, Apple's got their own engine in Safari. I wonder if they would spin it out? It's probably not open source so we would have to wait for them.:-(
Does anyone know of a project to bring some of the fast Javascript implementations like V8 to the server? It could be like PHP or Perl, only very fast-- if the numbers hold out. I would like to write in the same language on the client and the server. (Java almost achieved that...)
I realize I could just ask Google, but why not ask humans at Slashdot? How much does the virtualization cost us. It's clear that 10 boxes can't do the work of 100. They can only do the work of 10. But how much does the virtualization absorb? Is it 10% so the 10 boxes really do the work of 9? Or is it worse?
And what's a bit troubling to me is that this is the second layer of bureaucracy in the machines. The OS already has semi-virtualization turned on to keep the different processes from running into each other. What does the second layer cost in performance?
I didn't believe the nutcases until I saw one of the shows. They weren't talking about tinfoil on their heads-- they had some pretty interesting points if you ask me.
Let's face it. People lie and so do the governments they form. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. They lie to cover up, to make believe, to get rich, and to advance a million other schemes. Some of the lies are even honorable and kind, but that doesn't change the fact that it occurs.
It doesn't take too much work to find lies as big as the moon landings. According to the press releases and the briefings, we were "winning" the Vietnam war up until the very last strategic withdrawal. President Clinton didn't have sexual relations with that woman. Terrorists set the fire in the Reichstag. The US signed a treaty forbidding biological weapons.
So I think that Nasa should answer these things. I think the cost of a few historians isn't very much compared to the cost of a space probe or a Mars Lander or even an additional programmer. What the heck.
It's well and good to feel sorry for the poor journalist in Atlanta who's being preyed upon by the lawyers, but it's really the member of the Rolling Stones who's getting screwed. The lawyers are billing him by the hour to "defend his name". They probably have some generic agreement which allows them to take action like this and bill it back to the man. They don't really care if it makes sense or in the best interests of society, they just want to run up the hours. Feel sorry for the poor guy from the Rolling Stones who's paying the bills.
I realize that the official Slashdot editorial voice seems to believe that the moon landings really did happen. Perhaps they did. But $15k seems a small price to pay for a good discussion-- especially when Nasa routinely spends billions on things. Why can't they just classify it as history or something sociological?
BTW: I've never studied the information put forth by the conspiracy theorists or the debunkers, but I can say that a few of the claims that flitted past my eyes seemed fairly worrisome. Maybe some day when I've got the time, I'll try to dig deeper. In the meantime, I'm not going to let the government off the hook just because the Slashdot editorial voice says "It happened." After companies like Enron and World Com lied so completely to everyone about the EXISTENCE of BILLIONS of DOLLARS of so-called profits, I'm beginning to think that it would be possible to pull off the hoax. After all, auditors and the SEC checked out the corporations. There's no regulatory body checking out moon landings. So call me firmly undecided, at least until NASA writes the book.
I'm dealing with some cross-platform XML these days. It's generally pretty wonderful, but the newline character is something that drives me a bit batty. If anyone can bring some unity to this disunity, I'm sure that all of the XML world and the Java world would be better off. It's an anachronism.
Dude-- read the review. Here are a few sentences from the top:
On the first and most obvious level, the book is just the typical, thorough treatment of the important APIs that we've come to expect from O'Reilly. There are chapters addressing all of the important layers of the Mozilla platform and plenty of examples that show you how to customize the platform. Some may want to change the icons and others may want to add more robust features. The range of possibilities is surprising and coders are creating one-to-one communications enhancements, add-on widgets, and even games. There are certainly some things missing, and some areas that could use more detail or more complicated examples, but the book is already 454 pages long.
Sounds like he talks about what can and can't be done with the code samples and even a bit about a few of the individual chapters. He just didn't do one of those boring Slashdot reviews that goes through each chapter one by one. I can get the chapter breakdown from the book's website.
And if you ask me, knowing what to do with the XML is pretty important. If the Mozillians are smart, then that means there's something of value int he book. I really don't want a well-written, witty book about how to write assembler code. Dis
I can see how this might be a very useful way to carry relatively light cargo across the oceans. As long as the buoyancy of the entire ship is in the right range, it will work. This might be a good way to move floatable objects like Nike Shoes across the oceans.
What do you think? Want to build a big sucker?
Do you feel used by the management team of WorldCom? Do you feel that bold, crowd-pleasing projections like this helped blow up a big tech bubble and bamboozle the gullible, non-tech-educated public? Are scientists just puppets of the businessmen, or do scientists have some obligation to avoid aligning themselves with fraudulent enterprises? Can scientists do anything to avoid having their inventions turned into tools for fraud?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, but DRM also protects the smaller authors who would be happy to eke out a comfortable life. If the books can only be free, then people can only write books as a hobby. That means only rich people can write books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/arts/television/08assassin.html Made me want to buy the game.
I like free sites. I want them to continue. Therefore it is my job to sustain their business model. If I like a business I need to support it or at least not try to get their services for free.
People who are in the top percentage of wealth concentration benefit the most from public spending. Oh really? Then you follow immediately with the example of the roads. A dude in a $1000 beater gets as much use out of a road as someone driving an $300k+ Maserati. The soldiers defend all of us pretty much equally. (Yea, I know this isn't exactly true, but it's pretty close.)
Amazon isn't contributing anything to the local economy? Huh? When they employ people, those people pay plenty of taxes. In some states, they aren't sales taxes, but the employees still pay income and property tax. Plus, why should Amazon collect taxes in the state where the purchaser lives? If anything, the delivery of that object depends much more on the infrastructure of the state holding the warehouse and the states in between. Trust me. California is making plenty of money from the salaries that UPS pays the delivery team. They just want to add an additional 10% on top of everything because they can't stop taxing.
Sure and I want leather seats and a massage when I read it. While I think every place would love to provide all of these features, I think you have to be realistic. ANd believe me, you're going to have to be realistic because a number of newspapers are going to go out of business and you're going to be stuck with Jerry's Sub Shop and Blog-o-matic. When Jerry's not waiting on his sandwich customers, he'll report the news he hears. And then let's see if Jerry has the time to beg you to read his blog.
Peter Wayner gave a talk at Google about helping to pay for shoe leather several years ago:
http://www.wayner.org/talks/gtalk.html
I'm an Internet user. I'm entitled to EVERYTHING FOR FREE!!!!! I'm sorry. I wish that ad revenue could support the news business, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. The Internet has lead to a proliferation of advertising opportunities and it's all supply and demand. Companies like Facebook are going to be able to clean the clocks of major newspapers because Facebook users create the content for free and don't need any share of the ad revenue. Newspapers have to pay the salaries of reporters. So if professional writers can't compete in the ad biz, they need to charge for their work. I'm not happy about paying, but I would rather pay than go without professional news. I'll still love the bloggers, but there are somethings that require some professional staff.
If you're talking about the Free Internet Press, I think you're dreaming about your contribution to society. One article I read is pure copyright infringement. There's a short notice at the end offering people to read the original story in a different "context." BS. You're worse than a link farm. You're a thief.
I've always liked the way to hide information in a list of things. Peter Wayner wrote a Java thingee that starts with a list of top disco songs. Talk about ambiguous. Any order would make sense. But you can use any list. Here's my favorites: Barry White: Barry White's Greatest Hits (20th Century, 1975) KC & The Sunshine Band: KC & The Sunshine Band (TK, 1975) Gregg Diamond Bionic Boogie: Hot Butterfly (Polydor, 1978) The Jimmy Castor Bunch: Butt Of Course (Atlantic, 1974) Silver Convention: Save Me (Midland International, 1975) Voyage: Voyage; Fly Away (Marlin, 1978) First Choice: Delusions (Gold Mind, 1977) Beautiful Bend: Beautiful Bend (Marlin, 1978) Candi Staton: Young Hearts Run Free (Warner Bros., 1976) Loleatta Holloway: Loleatta (Gold Mind/Salsoul, 1976) Trammps: The Trammps (Golden Fleece/CBS, 1975) Giorgio Moroder: From Here to Eternity (Casablanca, 1985) Cerrone: Love In C Minor (Cotillion, 1977) Santa Esmeralda: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (Casablanca, 1977) Chic: Chic (Atlantic, 1977) Taana Gardner: Taana Gardner (West End, 1979) LaBelle: Nightbirds (Epic, 1974) B.T. Express: Do It ('Til You're Satisfied) (Roadshow, 1974) Salsoul Orchestra: The Salsoul Orchestra (Salsoul, 1975) Michael Zager Band: Let's All Chant (Private Stock, 1977) Donna Summer: The Donna Summer Anthology (Casablanca/Chronicles, 1993) Linda Clifford: If My Friends Could See Me Now (Curtom, 1978) Direct Current: Direct Current (TEC Records, 1979) Cloud One: Atmosphere Strutt (P&P, 1976) Gloria Gaynor: Never Can Say Goodbye (MGM, 1975) Kano: Kano (Emergency, 1980) France Joli: France Joli (Prelude, 1979) Village People: Village People (Casablanca, 1977) Diana Ross: The Boss (Motown, 1979) Tantra: The Double Album (Importe/12, 1980) Cerrone: Cerrone 3 - Supernature (Cotillion, 1978) Hamilton Bohannon: Summertime Groove (Mercury, 1978) Love And Kisses: Love And Kisses (Casablanca, 1977) Ashford & Simpson: So So Satisfied; Send It (Warner Bros., 1977) Isaac Hayes: Chocolate Chip (HBS, 1975) Love Unlimited: Under The Influence Of . . . (20th Century, 1973) Disco-Tex & The Sex-O-Lettes: Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes (Chelsea, 1975) Kool & The Gang: Wild And Peaceful (De-Lite, 1973) Sister Sledge: We Are Family (Cotillion, 1979) Sylvester: Step II (Fantasy, 1978) Change: The Glow Of Love (Warner Bros./RFC, 1980) Sister Sledge: Circle Of Love (Cotillion, 1975) Grace Jones: Portfolio (Island, 1977)
Well, yes, you can't trust the client. But there's a big advantage if you can run the validation code there before the person runs submit. That saves the load on your server and it makes everything more responsive for the user. (Javascript, no matter how slow, is usually faster than a roundtrip on the Internet.)
But still you can verify on the server too-- another argument for running the same code on the server and the client.
Well, yes. It depends upon how you structure your code. If you're using a strict MVC paradigm, it often doesn't make much sense to do anything but the V at the client.
:0)
But I've also built some math tools. After I got the first version running on the server, someone suggested moving it to the client because the client has plenty of spare cycles. SO i rewrote it in Javascript.
Also, it can be useful if you write a fairly sophisticated filtering function to make sure that someone doesn't input the wrong answer. You can run it on the client, but it might make sense to run it at the server at other times. If you can move them back and forth, then everything is consistent. (If the Javascript versions agree!
Well, yes, I love strict typing too. But hey, Java on the client isn't dominant. It often makes sense to run the same code on the server and the client. You can move code from the server to the client if you need to. And share code too.
Now if only all of the Javascript implementations agreed on a stable definition....
Here are some benchmarks:
Does anyone know of a project to bring some of the fast Javascript implementations like V8 to the server? It could be like PHP or Perl, only very fast-- if the numbers hold out. I would like to write in the same language on the client and the server. (Java almost achieved that...)
Oh come on. Downloading free music is a human right! Don't you care about fair use? Eeewwwww. You make me sick.
I realize I could just ask Google, but why not ask humans at Slashdot? How much does the virtualization cost us. It's clear that 10 boxes can't do the work of 100. They can only do the work of 10. But how much does the virtualization absorb? Is it 10% so the 10 boxes really do the work of 9? Or is it worse?
And what's a bit troubling to me is that this is the second layer of bureaucracy in the machines. The OS already has semi-virtualization turned on to keep the different processes from running into each other. What does the second layer cost in performance?
I didn't believe the nutcases until I saw one of the shows. They weren't talking about tinfoil on their heads-- they had some pretty interesting points if you ask me.
Let's face it. People lie and so do the governments they form. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. They lie to cover up, to make believe, to get rich, and to advance a million other schemes. Some of the lies are even honorable and kind, but that doesn't change the fact that it occurs.
It doesn't take too much work to find lies as big as the moon landings. According to the press releases and the briefings, we were "winning" the Vietnam war up until the very last strategic withdrawal. President Clinton didn't have sexual relations with that woman. Terrorists set the fire in the Reichstag. The US signed a treaty forbidding biological weapons.
So I think that Nasa should answer these things. I think the cost of a few historians isn't very much compared to the cost of a space probe or a Mars Lander or even an additional programmer. What the heck.
It's well and good to feel sorry for the poor journalist in Atlanta who's being preyed upon by the lawyers, but it's really the member of the Rolling Stones who's getting screwed. The lawyers are billing him by the hour to "defend his name". They probably have some generic agreement which allows them to take action like this and bill it back to the man. They don't really care if it makes sense or in the best interests of society, they just want to run up the hours. Feel sorry for the poor guy from the Rolling Stones who's paying the bills.
I realize that the official Slashdot editorial voice seems to believe that the moon landings really did happen. Perhaps they did. But $15k seems a small price to pay for a good discussion-- especially when Nasa routinely spends billions on things. Why can't they just classify it as history or something sociological?
BTW: I've never studied the information put forth by the conspiracy theorists or the debunkers, but I can say that a few of the claims that flitted past my eyes seemed fairly worrisome. Maybe some day when I've got the time, I'll try to dig deeper. In the meantime, I'm not going to let the government off the hook just because the Slashdot editorial voice says "It happened." After companies like Enron and World Com lied so completely to everyone about the EXISTENCE of BILLIONS of DOLLARS of so-called profits, I'm beginning to think that it would be possible to pull off the hoax. After all, auditors and the SEC checked out the corporations. There's no regulatory body checking out moon landings. So call me firmly undecided, at least until NASA writes the book.
I'm dealing with some cross-platform XML these days. It's generally pretty wonderful, but the newline character is something that drives me a bit batty. If anyone can bring some unity to this disunity, I'm sure that all of the XML world and the Java world would be better off. It's an anachronism.
Dude-- read the review. Here are a few sentences from the top: On the first and most obvious level, the book is just the typical, thorough treatment of the important APIs that we've come to expect from O'Reilly. There are chapters addressing all of the important layers of the Mozilla platform and plenty of examples that show you how to customize the platform. Some may want to change the icons and others may want to add more robust features. The range of possibilities is surprising and coders are creating one-to-one communications enhancements, add-on widgets, and even games. There are certainly some things missing, and some areas that could use more detail or more complicated examples, but the book is already 454 pages long.
Sounds like he talks about what can and can't be done with the code samples and even a bit about a few of the individual chapters. He just didn't do one of those boring Slashdot reviews that goes through each chapter one by one. I can get the chapter breakdown from the book's website.
And if you ask me, knowing what to do with the XML is pretty important. If the Mozillians are smart, then that means there's something of value int he book. I really don't want a well-written, witty book about how to write assembler code. Dis
I can see how this might be a very useful way to carry relatively light cargo across the oceans. As long as the buoyancy of the entire ship is in the right range, it will work. This might be a good way to move floatable objects like Nike Shoes across the oceans. What do you think? Want to build a big sucker?
It took them two extra years to make it Y2K compliant! And civilization on earth didn't fail.
Do you feel used by the management team of WorldCom? Do you feel that bold, crowd-pleasing projections like this helped blow up a big tech bubble and bamboozle the gullible, non-tech-educated public? Are scientists just puppets of the businessmen, or do scientists have some obligation to avoid aligning themselves with fraudulent enterprises? Can scientists do anything to avoid having their inventions turned into tools for fraud?