You actually think MS should just not develop products because there are a bunch of various different open source tools people could use instead?
Not as such. It's not even a case of Microsoft's bloody-minded determination to to re-invent every wheel in existence that
irritates. It's the fact that having invented a triangular replacement for a circular wheel, Microsoft will then - without fail - try and shove it down the throats of their user base.
I know that's a mixed metaphor, but it seems oddly apropos.
However, I think that a lot of people defend net neutrality as a way
of protecting services like Vonage from the bad telco/ISP's and hence
I take issue with that issue.
mmm... Vonage is rather the poster child for Net Neutrality; it's a popular
company, widely popular and under siege from various vested interests. And
in a great many ways, Vonage's plight exemplifies a lot of the abuses waiting
in the wings if we abandon NN. But that doesn't mean that Vonage or VOIP are
what the debate is about, and I don't think you're doing anyone any favours
by representing it as such.
Let me just leave one final thought for you, however... a smallish number of users can run Kazaa and other P2P software and interfere with everyone else's bandwidth
Here's a thought in return: I don't care if your ISP traffic shapes
your traffic. That can be covered by the terms and conditions of your
service agreement. It may be problem for people in areas where there's
only really one or two service providers, but in the general case,
if your ISP is too restrictive, you just change ISPs. Market forces apply
and all that.
What I do care about is if a telecoms company other than your ISP wants to
start degrading your traffic for their commercial advantage.
You can't do anything about that: it's not like you can say
"oh, I'll just use another Internet". And that's what the Net Neutrality debate is about.
It's not about ISPs rate throttling bittorrent traffic from their customers, it's about
third party carriers shouting "Stand And Deliver" on the information superhighway.
Does this break the internet? I don't think so.
If it's your ISP shaping your traffic in ways covered by your
service agreement, then neither do I. But that's not the issue. The issue
is when carriers start de-prioritising everything that doesn't directly earn
them money. That is what will break the Internet. That's what the
debate is about.
Note that I do design and implement telephony solutions for customers, both VOIP and PSTN. Thus far, I have set up VOIP
solutions for customers only on their internal networks due to reliability concerns I have with the technology as a whole.
I share those concerns. VOIP is a fun toy, and a useful tool in certain specialised circumstances. I don't think the
infrastructure currently exists for it to be a viable primary telephony system.
Where we differ is that you seem quite content to break the Internet in the general case, just so long as you can safeguard one
particular application area. I can't accept that as a wise move.
And I do wonder if you're not letting your own personal involvement lead you to have an exaggerated idea
of the importance of VOIP. I mean, you seem like a decent chap, and all that. But for all your talk about minimal intervention,
it seems all you really want is to intervene in the way we use the 'net for your own personal benefit.
I wouldn't mind so much, but the end you see as being so important is simply to turn the internet into a telephone system. And, respectfully, we already have one of those. Worse, by the time the dust settles from the lawsuits your proposals will generate, it'll be a telephone system controlled by the same vested interests that control the current system. No disruptive technology, no consumer choice, no real benefit to VOIP over a land line.
Or are you implying that you think adults shouldn't "behave in a civilized manner"?
No, I'm implying (and said so outright in the flowing paragraph) that a maxim that is useful for educating children
doesn't necessarily work well as a principle of government. Also, I think your Straw Man is late for his appointment with the Wizard
No, there's a difference between the initiation of force (the armed robbery) and the use of force in a defensive or restitutionary role (taking back the stolen property, and possibly incarcerating the thief). The former is wrong; the latter isn't.
Splendid! And would you therefore agree that the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" strongly implies a responsive role
rather than an initiatory one? After all if it was an initiatory case you'd say something like "don't be mean". Or maybe
"Billy, stop hitting your sister".
This is unlike the case we were discussing in that both the subsidy and the restrictions involve the initiation of force against a non-aggressor
In which case, the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" doesn't really apply in this situation.
Which, you may recall, was my original point.
Net neutrality causes a number of problems too regarding viability of VOIP.
Nope. Lack of bandwidth causes problems for VOIP. Net Neutrality stops ISPs from preying on a market in which they are neither producer nor consumer, and in which they have no incentive to be fair or to consider the market's long term viability. It'd be nice not to needlessly conflate the two.
I would not get any VOIP service as a primary system without some sort of QoS guarantee on the ISP's side.
What? Skype won't install on your machine with out a contract with your ISP? Do behave, there's a good fellow.
Many people don't care, but I don't want my phone service going down because of network congestion.
Not so much "don't care", more "don't think it's important enough to warrant breaking the rest of the internet".
I don't want your phone service going down through network congestion, either. But if the delays are due to a lot of non-VOIP traffic in between you and the person you want to call, then that's just your hard luck. If you want to guarantee that sort of access, get a land line; that's their selling point, after all.
I also have no problem with ISP's using traffic shaping to ensure that users of P2P downloading software don't slow down everyone else's connection.
Why oh why are so many people determined to mis-represent this issue as a clash between P2P and VOIP? What you're saying wouldn't just hurt bittorrent users; it would stifle every non-mainstream use of the internet. There'd be no more disruptive technologies emerging from the internet - they'd be de-prioritised to make way for "legitimate traffic" and die before there was ever enough of a userbase to contemplate a class action lawsuit.
And that's really my problem with your proposal: it's broken by default, and you have to go to court against a cartel of wealthy corporations to enable any new usage.
I merely said firstly, that what they are doing is technically legal, and that drawing a parallel between the mafia and ISPs is inequitable.
On the other hand, I hope you will concede that the only reason that particular distinction exists is that government once passed laws to outlaw murder and assassination.
Admittedly, this doesn't alter the fact that one business practice (as I'm sure many career criminals might think of it) is illegal, while the other is not. And that's fair enough. The problems start when people being to argue that since a business practice is currently lega, the government has no business making it illegal.
I'm not saying that's your point - I'm jumping in midway here - but it seems to be the emerging meme from the anti NN faction in this discussion.
The problem with assuming people can just go to competition in this case
Not an assumption I'm making, BTW. I argue for net neutrality as the only workable solution. Just a note in passing.
For example, suppose you use Verizon and DSL. You should be able to buy the DSL line without getting land line service, and you should be able to get Vonage. That should be prioritized in terms of routing at the standard priority
Right. But now you seem to be talking about prioritising by third party service provider, rather than by protocol. At it's best that tends toward net neutrality, but at its worst it allows the ISPs with deep pockets to stamp out emerging protocols knowing that they can keep the matter tied up in court for longer than their challengers can afford to pursue the case. It'd be software patents all over again.
Ever hear the saying, "two wrongs don't make a right"?
Yes, and it makes an excellent maxim when trying to teach children to behave
in a civilised manner.
On the other hand, as a principle of government, it would require us to repeal the laws against highway robbery, since it would be wrong of us to incarcerate armed robbers just because they were doing something wrong themselves. So maybe it isn't terribly useful in this context.
Note that I draw the line at degrading services. I have no problem with offering priority routing for VOIP, etc. I do have a problem with degrading VOIP to all other providers, etc.
But that's the problem. What about the ISP that has a Telephony Over IP service (TOIP) which is superficially similar to VOIP, but uses the ISPs own proprietary, patented, encrypted and DMCAed protocol? Then they can priority routing TOIP, because it's more efficient (of course) and de-prioritise VOIP which is wasteful of their bandwidth.
And this would be fair because everyone's TOIP traffic gets prioritised equally. The fact that only one ISP offers the service is neither here nor there.
And, if they happen to be an ISP with a traditional land line service, they can charge enough for TOIP that none of their customers will want to use it either - so you get double the efficiency and the ISP gets to protect a failing business model for a bit longer.
The idea may be good, but by the time the lawyers get through with it... I'd sooner see
net neutrality, I think.
The group is headed by Patrick Ross, a former senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a strongly free-market think tank.
Does not compute philosophically. You'd think a free market idealogue would be against copyrights...
I assumed they were using the words in their most Orwellian sense. You know, in "1984" the Ministry of Peace was in charge of War,
the Ministry of Plenty was in charge or rationing, and as for the Ministry of Love... well you get the idea.
If you think of it like that, the Progress & Freedom Foundation makes perfect sense.
Of course, all the instances I've seen have been windows fanboys
busy constructing straw men, or just scattering flamebait. Usually
with way too much use of block caps for emphasis.
If my idea is the only thing I have, and I give it away, I don't eat. That's "so what".
And I don't want to sound callous, but again: so what?
Obviously, you need to eat. The problem lies in the way you wish to earn money. Compelling as your hunger may be,
if "a man needs to eat" was a winning argument in this context, we should be morally obliged to legalise pickpocketing,
burglary and the slave trade.
/blockquote>
Clearly we want to reward people to create patterns for a living
mmmm... I think it would help if you used something a little less ambiguous that "patterns". I mean you could argue that a movie is just a pattern of light and darkness, sound and silence. Or you could argue that "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back" is a pattern for a whole class of films, and that you deserve a reward for being the first one to shout out "MINE!".
For the first case, you can make some legitimate arguments. For the second case, I really don't think we do need to reward people
for trying to control what we can say and do and think. Which is what it comes down to once you accept the notion that ideas
can be property
The sellers are still working under an old paradigm, and it's unfair to tell them that they're the losers until somebody manages to come up with a new paradigm.
Let's try a thought experiment here: suppose that starting tomorrow you could buy a magic peripheral that would allow your computer to print food for no extra charge. What do we do? Do we distribute these things to every corner of the globe, so that mankind can finally stop worrying about where his next meal is coming from, and find something more interesting to occupy his time? Or do we say "it's unfair to use this technology until we find a way that lets the supermarkets make just as much money from it?"
The problem with the second approach is that for the supermarkets to keep the same profit margin, they need to enforce the same levels of scarcity as existed before. Which means that we'd be no better off for this marvelous new gadget.
Yes, the paradigm has shifted. Yes, there are going to be casualties. Yes, we are going to need new ways to fund creative works. And yes, some big business are going to go out of business before all this is over. But just as in the thought experiment,
the only way to keep the media companies happy is going to be to cripple the new paradigm so it works no better than the first.
I'd be less upset if Slashdotters showed any interest in coming up with that new paradigm.
I think it's busy emerging, and will continue to do so. We're going to see a lot more bands putting music online for free in order to publicise tours. We've probably seen the last of the rock and roll billionaires, but really, if you want to be that rich, study banking or something. The hard question is the film industry, which does have a lot of unavoidable up-front costs. Then again, we have projects like Elephant's Dream, and we have fan made films on the internet where the quality is starting to approach the low end of movie output. I think that we're going to see more films made on money raised by subscription. I think we'll see a lot fewer actors charging multi-million dollar fees. And sadly we'll probably see a lot more product placement.
At the end of the day, I don't suppose I have the answers, either. But both human nature and the law of supply and demand are against you here. I don't think it's an argument that can be won
(Well, there's the ever popular "musicians should play more concerts" model. If I ever meet such a person in person, I shall ask them if they've ever tried to play concerts professionally, and if they haven't I shall spit in their faces.)
Jolly good. First of all, I think the argument is that almost all musicians make money from the tours in the first place.
Bands don't see anything fr
entities where that scarcity must be artificiality enforced from the outset
You mean like DRM;-)
Yes, exactly. DRM and DMCA: both are attempts to create an artificial scarcity in the
face of a technology that reduces the costs of distribution to near zero. Good point.
Respectfully, so what? Not everything works best as a zero sum game,
The point is that ultimately intellectual property and real property are not quite as different as your quote would have us believe.
The point is that ultimately, intellectual property and real property have nothing whatsoever in common except that
some groups are trying to assert ownership the same rights over ideas that have been traditionally granted over
tangibles. The difference is that if I have an apple I can give away one apple. If I have an idea, I can give the idea away a hundred times and still have the idea.
In this sense, the term "intellectual property" is begging the question - it assumes that ideas and physical objects share the same economic properties, and then uses that assumption to defend the assumption itself. That's called circular logic, and it's an accepted logical fallacy.
So the question becomes, "is it really sensible to apply property laws designed for scarcity based economic systems to intellectual entities where that scarcity must be artificiality enforced from the outset?" History suggests this is not a viable long term option.
What's "the" standard hair color?
What's "the" standard shape for snowflakes?
What's "the" standard DNA sequence?
That's better. It doesn't improve the argument though; listing things that don't need standards
doesn't mean that standards are neither useful nor desirable in other areas.
What's "the" standard Shoe size?
Obviously there isn't one. But if you buy a pair of shoes from someone whose sizes are 20% smaller than the standard ones... well, you'll soon know about it, put it that way. But I guess to your way of thinking, that'd be your fault for having the wrong size feet.
What's "the" standard webserver?
Now webservers are a bit like shoes here. There isn't a standard shoe size but having standard sizes can eliminate a lot of pointless anguish and strife. Likewise there is no standard webserver, but having them conform to the same protocol is what made webservers worth having in the first place. And as with shoes, if you get one that doesn't quite conform to the standard, well you could be in for a lot of unnecessary aggravation.
What's "the" standard OS?
What's "the" standard railway carriage? There isn't one, of course. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be standard gauges for track. We don't insist that everyone uses the same make of train engine, but it's a really bad idea to let someone vary the width of the track to suit their marketing department's needs
Similarly, I we're not suggesting a standard O/S. Heck, we don't want a standard word processor. But we'd quite like to have a choice of word processor, just like you should have a choice when buying railway carriages.
now the Slashdot crowd spits out quite a bit that Microsoft is a failure -except- for XP, which is semi-acceptable.
And I've got no doubt that given ten years for the hardware to catch up,
and for MS to the worst of the bugs, Vista may well become semi-acceptable as well.
Now we see with Vista? Same damn thing. "OMG no drivers, omg games, omg its slow, omg omg omg failure, I'll never upgrade from the previous version!"
But I did upgrade from the previous version; I upgraded to Linux:D And I'm not looking to downgrade any time soon.
Seriously, MS lost me with XP. It was about at the point where my old dad bought a new computer (at my advice) and then discovered he'd need to spend about three times the cost of the machine on new software, a new printer... It's probably very petty of me, but it was the final straw as far as MS were concerned.
I will admit to a touch of schadenfreude though at all these Vista disaster stories:)
I know what you mean. I think a lot of us were willing to cut Mr. Hilf a certain amount of slack, in the hope (admittedly forlorn) that he might actually do some good at Microsoft.
Oh well, just another shill, hoping that wishing might just this once make it so... kind of sad, really.
Honestly, after reading the full article the main quotes are either being taken very far out of context
(seems likely given the other quotes on the page), or he's expressed himself very poorly (also seems likely).
When you say "on the page" do you, I take it you mean the Bangkok Post, rather than the/. summary.
Although frankly, these quotes sound to me just like the drivel Hilf usually comes up with.
He's seemed lucid on these topics in the past so this is actually quite surprising.
I read the Slashdot interview with him, and I listened to him talk on LUG Radio, and the main thing that
impressed me was ability to spout fluent PR; at least on those occasions when Jono Bacon wasn't actively
crawling up his arse.
As for expressing himself poorly... well, if he did, it's something he does consistently. And frankly, given that MS
know PR so well, I'd be flabbergasted if I thought that he was saying anything they didn't want him to say and still
in his job.
I think he said exactly what he intended to say, personally.
Really? You must not hang around too many FOSS project forums.
Not too many. I'm a long time lurker on the FVWM development list,
and I spent some time recently on alsa-devel. I pay the occasional visit to
the LKML and I've poked my head into one or two others; generally people seem
courteous enough. Which groups do you hang out with?
FOSS developers develop for themselves
Well, yes, the urge to "scratch your itch" is a major motivator. On the other hand
if they didn't want other people to use their stuff they wouldn't go to all the trouble
of sorting out hosting, mailing lists and all the other admin that goes with an open source
project.
(And I know that sourceforge.net does it all for you; it's still heaps more trouble than not
bothering in the first place;)
if you the tiny little "user"
dare suggest am improvment to functionality or the UI, it's almost always
"shut the fuck up and contribute some code, leach!" or "write the patch
yourself if you want it that bad".
The trouble is that if you start letting users make design decisions without
contributing code, then anyone who likes can barge into your forum and appoint
themselves project manager. If that happens a few times, I can imagine people's
patience wearing a little thin.
Mind, that does nothing to excuse bad manners or poor communication skills. But I
think it's a mistake to conclude that the devs don't want the software to be useful.
It's just that they have pretty clear cut ideas about how to make it useful.
Now, a lot of the time what they develop is what people want, but that's not the same thing.
mmm... but that's true of all software development, I think. People set out to write something
that fits in with the way they work. We tend to have this subconscious arrogance that says that
"If everyone worked the same way I work, they'd all be so much more productive. Therefore I will
write this software to reflect my work patterns, and then they will all SEE! Bwha-ha-ha-ha!"
And sometimes they're right, more often they're wrong, and sometimes it falls in between
and they get a niche following who find the software suits their work patterns as well. And that's
OK in my book. Let Microsoft do the focus groups and the lowest common denominator interfaces.
We can afford a little diversity.
"That's the dirty little secret. When I talk to open source developers, at least half are talking about Windows, from SugarCRM, MySQL, PHP. Every single one,"
Interesting, isn't it?
The FOSS devs are mainly interested in writing software people want to use. To that end they don't really care what platform their stuff runs on, so long as people find it useful.
Microsoft on the other hand approach the problem from the opposite direction. They don't really care whether people find their software particularly useful or not, so long as they can destroy all the alternatives. You could hardly ask for a more succinct summary of the
difference between the two camps.
As an aside, wasn't Hilf supposed to be from a FOSS background, back before MS hired him as their Open Source Guy?
Seems either he never really understood FOSS, or else he's just been at MS so long that's gone native.
Unfortunately Linux gamers are an edge case. People needing video card support on Linux above vanilla SVGA as a whole is an edge case.
Then again, as I understand it, gamers aren't the target audience. The reason that NVidia wrote Linux drivers in the first place was that Hollywood CGI shops like Industrial Light and Magic had a big investment in *nix apps. NVidia more or less inherited that business from Silicon Graphics, but they weren't going to keep it long unless they came up with drivers that worked on Linux.
Now (again, as I understand it) NVidia gets enough of an income stream from that business to make it worthwhile keeping a Linux team on the payroll. ATI came late to the party, and their Linux driver were more an attempt to break into the market, but they never generated enough income to support a full time dev team like at NVidia. WHich is one reason why AIT Linux drivers were often late in being released and buggy in comparison to NVidia's offering.
That's also why it makes sense for ATI to open their driver source code. They can't maintain the code base themselves, at least not well enough to keep up with NVidia and kernel developments both. On the other hand, the penny seems to have finally dropped that maybe they don't have to.
At worst, this gives them something comparable to NVidia. The open factor is probably going to make ATI a lot more attractive to the Linux geeks at the various render farms. And, you know, they might even see some income from Linux desktops as well. Certainly, if they pull this off, I'll have bought my last NVidia card.
Slashdot Mirror
Not as such. It's not even a case of Microsoft's bloody-minded determination to to re-invent every wheel in existence that irritates. It's the fact that having invented a triangular replacement for a circular wheel, Microsoft will then - without fail - try and shove it down the throats of their user base.
I know that's a mixed metaphor, but it seems oddly apropos.
mmm... Vonage is rather the poster child for Net Neutrality; it's a popular company, widely popular and under siege from various vested interests. And in a great many ways, Vonage's plight exemplifies a lot of the abuses waiting in the wings if we abandon NN. But that doesn't mean that Vonage or VOIP are what the debate is about, and I don't think you're doing anyone any favours by representing it as such.
Here's a thought in return: I don't care if your ISP traffic shapes your traffic. That can be covered by the terms and conditions of your service agreement. It may be problem for people in areas where there's only really one or two service providers, but in the general case, if your ISP is too restrictive, you just change ISPs. Market forces apply and all that.
What I do care about is if a telecoms company other than your ISP wants to start degrading your traffic for their commercial advantage. You can't do anything about that: it's not like you can say "oh, I'll just use another Internet". And that's what the Net Neutrality debate is about. It's not about ISPs rate throttling bittorrent traffic from their customers, it's about third party carriers shouting "Stand And Deliver" on the information superhighway.
If it's your ISP shaping your traffic in ways covered by your service agreement, then neither do I. But that's not the issue. The issue is when carriers start de-prioritising everything that doesn't directly earn them money. That is what will break the Internet. That's what the debate is about.
I share those concerns. VOIP is a fun toy, and a useful tool in certain specialised circumstances. I don't think the infrastructure currently exists for it to be a viable primary telephony system.
Where we differ is that you seem quite content to break the Internet in the general case, just so long as you can safeguard one particular application area. I can't accept that as a wise move.
And I do wonder if you're not letting your own personal involvement lead you to have an exaggerated idea of the importance of VOIP. I mean, you seem like a decent chap, and all that. But for all your talk about minimal intervention, it seems all you really want is to intervene in the way we use the 'net for your own personal benefit.
I wouldn't mind so much, but the end you see as being so important is simply to turn the internet into a telephone system. And, respectfully, we already have one of those. Worse, by the time the dust settles from the lawsuits your proposals will generate, it'll be a telephone system controlled by the same vested interests that control the current system. No disruptive technology, no consumer choice, no real benefit to VOIP over a land line.
Sorry, no sale.
No, I'm implying (and said so outright in the flowing paragraph) that a maxim that is useful for educating children doesn't necessarily work well as a principle of government. Also, I think your Straw Man is late for his appointment with the Wizard
Splendid! And would you therefore agree that the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" strongly implies a responsive role rather than an initiatory one? After all if it was an initiatory case you'd say something like "don't be mean". Or maybe "Billy, stop hitting your sister".
In which case, the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" doesn't really apply in this situation. Which, you may recall, was my original point.
Sorry, but I think you missed the point.
Go back, read the post I was responding to, and then re-read my response. If you still think I'm out of line tell me why and we'll discuss it.
Bonus points if you can do it without use of the word "fuck".
Nope. Lack of bandwidth causes problems for VOIP. Net Neutrality stops ISPs from preying on a market in which they are neither producer nor consumer, and in which they have no incentive to be fair or to consider the market's long term viability. It'd be nice not to needlessly conflate the two.
What? Skype won't install on your machine with out a contract with your ISP? Do behave, there's a good fellow.
Not so much "don't care", more "don't think it's important enough to warrant breaking the rest of the internet".
I don't want your phone service going down through network congestion, either. But if the delays are due to a lot of non-VOIP traffic in between you and the person you want to call, then that's just your hard luck. If you want to guarantee that sort of access, get a land line; that's their selling point, after all.
Why oh why are so many people determined to mis-represent this issue as a clash between P2P and VOIP? What you're saying wouldn't just hurt bittorrent users; it would stifle every non-mainstream use of the internet. There'd be no more disruptive technologies emerging from the internet - they'd be de-prioritised to make way for "legitimate traffic" and die before there was ever enough of a userbase to contemplate a class action lawsuit.
And that's really my problem with your proposal: it's broken by default, and you have to go to court against a cartel of wealthy corporations to enable any new usage.
I'm sorry, but it just won't work.
On the other hand, I hope you will concede that the only reason that particular distinction exists is that government once passed laws to outlaw murder and assassination.
Admittedly, this doesn't alter the fact that one business practice (as I'm sure many career criminals might think of it) is illegal, while the other is not. And that's fair enough. The problems start when people being to argue that since a business practice is currently lega, the government has no business making it illegal.
I'm not saying that's your point - I'm jumping in midway here - but it seems to be the emerging meme from the anti NN faction in this discussion.
Not an assumption I'm making, BTW. I argue for net neutrality as the only workable solution. Just a note in passing.
Right. But now you seem to be talking about prioritising by third party service provider, rather than by protocol. At it's best that tends toward net neutrality, but at its worst it allows the ISPs with deep pockets to stamp out emerging protocols knowing that they can keep the matter tied up in court for longer than their challengers can afford to pursue the case. It'd be software patents all over again.
Yes, and it makes an excellent maxim when trying to teach children to behave in a civilised manner.
On the other hand, as a principle of government, it would require us to repeal the laws against highway robbery, since it would be wrong of us to incarcerate armed robbers just because they were doing something wrong themselves. So maybe it isn't terribly useful in this context.
But that's the problem. What about the ISP that has a Telephony Over IP service (TOIP) which is superficially similar to VOIP, but uses the ISPs own proprietary, patented, encrypted and DMCAed protocol? Then they can priority routing TOIP, because it's more efficient (of course) and de-prioritise VOIP which is wasteful of their bandwidth. And this would be fair because everyone's TOIP traffic gets prioritised equally. The fact that only one ISP offers the service is neither here nor there.
And, if they happen to be an ISP with a traditional land line service, they can charge enough for TOIP that none of their customers will want to use it either - so you get double the efficiency and the ISP gets to protect a failing business model for a bit longer.
The idea may be good, but by the time the lawyers get through with it... I'd sooner see net neutrality, I think.
I assumed they were using the words in their most Orwellian sense. You know, in "1984" the Ministry of Peace was in charge of War, the Ministry of Plenty was in charge or rationing, and as for the Ministry of Love... well you get the idea.
If you think of it like that, the Progress & Freedom Foundation makes perfect sense.
Yeah, me too.
Of course, all the instances I've seen have been windows fanboys busy constructing straw men, or just scattering flamebait. Usually with way too much use of block caps for emphasis.
I've not been taking them very seriously.
And I don't want to sound callous, but again: so what?
Obviously, you need to eat. The problem lies in the way you wish to earn money. Compelling as your hunger may be, if "a man needs to eat" was a winning argument in this context, we should be morally obliged to legalise pickpocketing, burglary and the slave trade.
mmmm... I think it would help if you used something a little less ambiguous that "patterns". I mean you could argue that a movie is just a pattern of light and darkness, sound and silence. Or you could argue that "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back" is a pattern for a whole class of films, and that you deserve a reward for being the first one to shout out "MINE!".
For the first case, you can make some legitimate arguments. For the second case, I really don't think we do need to reward people for trying to control what we can say and do and think. Which is what it comes down to once you accept the notion that ideas can be property
Let's try a thought experiment here: suppose that starting tomorrow you could buy a magic peripheral that would allow your computer to print food for no extra charge. What do we do? Do we distribute these things to every corner of the globe, so that mankind can finally stop worrying about where his next meal is coming from, and find something more interesting to occupy his time? Or do we say "it's unfair to use this technology until we find a way that lets the supermarkets make just as much money from it?"
The problem with the second approach is that for the supermarkets to keep the same profit margin, they need to enforce the same levels of scarcity as existed before. Which means that we'd be no better off for this marvelous new gadget.
Yes, the paradigm has shifted. Yes, there are going to be casualties. Yes, we are going to need new ways to fund creative works. And yes, some big business are going to go out of business before all this is over. But just as in the thought experiment, the only way to keep the media companies happy is going to be to cripple the new paradigm so it works no better than the first.
I think it's busy emerging, and will continue to do so. We're going to see a lot more bands putting music online for free in order to publicise tours. We've probably seen the last of the rock and roll billionaires, but really, if you want to be that rich, study banking or something. The hard question is the film industry, which does have a lot of unavoidable up-front costs. Then again, we have projects like Elephant's Dream, and we have fan made films on the internet where the quality is starting to approach the low end of movie output. I think that we're going to see more films made on money raised by subscription. I think we'll see a lot fewer actors charging multi-million dollar fees. And sadly we'll probably see a lot more product placement.
At the end of the day, I don't suppose I have the answers, either. But both human nature and the law of supply and demand are against you here. I don't think it's an argument that can be won
Jolly good. First of all, I think the argument is that almost all musicians make money from the tours in the first place. Bands don't see anything fr
No, that would be the implementation of my idea that you get.
Specific implementations of ideas already enjoy considerable protection under law.Yes, exactly. DRM and DMCA: both are attempts to create an artificial scarcity in the face of a technology that reduces the costs of distribution to near zero. Good point.
Respectfully, so what? Not everything works best as a zero sum game,
The point is that ultimately, intellectual property and real property have nothing whatsoever in common except that some groups are trying to assert ownership the same rights over ideas that have been traditionally granted over tangibles. The difference is that if I have an apple I can give away one apple. If I have an idea, I can give the idea away a hundred times and still have the idea.
In this sense, the term "intellectual property" is begging the question - it assumes that ideas and physical objects share the same economic properties, and then uses that assumption to defend the assumption itself. That's called circular logic, and it's an accepted logical fallacy.
So the question becomes, "is it really sensible to apply property laws designed for scarcity based economic systems to intellectual entities where that scarcity must be artificiality enforced from the outset?" History suggests this is not a viable long term option.
Heh. This from a poster whose prior contribution consisted of three lines of sarcasm with neither context nor conclusion
Double standard much?
What's the standard hair color?
Oops, forgot the quotes, let's try that again.
What's "the" standard hair color?
What's "the" standard shape for snowflakes?
What's "the" standard DNA sequence?
That's better. It doesn't improve the argument though; listing things that don't need standards doesn't mean that standards are neither useful nor desirable in other areas.
What's "the" standard Shoe size?
Obviously there isn't one. But if you buy a pair of shoes from someone whose sizes are 20% smaller than the standard ones... well, you'll soon know about it, put it that way. But I guess to your way of thinking, that'd be your fault for having the wrong size feet.
Now webservers are a bit like shoes here. There isn't a standard shoe size but having standard sizes can eliminate a lot of pointless anguish and strife. Likewise there is no standard webserver, but having them conform to the same protocol is what made webservers worth having in the first place. And as with shoes, if you get one that doesn't quite conform to the standard, well you could be in for a lot of unnecessary aggravation.
What's "the" standard railway carriage? There isn't one, of course. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be standard gauges for track. We don't insist that everyone uses the same make of train engine, but it's a really bad idea to let someone vary the width of the track to suit their marketing department's needs
Similarly, I we're not suggesting a standard O/S. Heck, we don't want a standard word processor. But we'd quite like to have a choice of word processor, just like you should have a choice when buying railway carriages.
And I've got no doubt that given ten years for the hardware to catch up, and for MS to the worst of the bugs, Vista may well become semi-acceptable as well.
But I did upgrade from the previous version; I upgraded to Linux :D And I'm not looking to downgrade any time soon.
Seriously, MS lost me with XP. It was about at the point where my old dad bought a new computer (at my advice) and then discovered he'd need to spend about three times the cost of the machine on new software, a new printer... It's probably very petty of me, but it was the final straw as far as MS were concerned.
I will admit to a touch of schadenfreude though at all these Vista disaster stories :)
That was Winston Smith post some horrific re-education at the hands of the wonderfully doublethinkful Ministry of Love.
I wonder what Hilf's excuse is for thinking like that...
When you say "on the page" do you, I take it you mean the Bangkok Post, rather than the /. summary.
Although frankly, these quotes sound to me just like the drivel Hilf usually comes up with.
I read the Slashdot interview with him, and I listened to him talk on LUG Radio, and the main thing that impressed me was ability to spout fluent PR; at least on those occasions when Jono Bacon wasn't actively crawling up his arse.
As for expressing himself poorly... well, if he did, it's something he does consistently. And frankly, given that MS know PR so well, I'd be flabbergasted if I thought that he was saying anything they didn't want him to say and still in his job.
I think he said exactly what he intended to say, personally.
Not too many. I'm a long time lurker on the FVWM development list, and I spent some time recently on alsa-devel. I pay the occasional visit to the LKML and I've poked my head into one or two others; generally people seem courteous enough. Which groups do you hang out with?
Well, yes, the urge to "scratch your itch" is a major motivator. On the other hand if they didn't want other people to use their stuff they wouldn't go to all the trouble of sorting out hosting, mailing lists and all the other admin that goes with an open source project.
(And I know that sourceforge.net does it all for you; it's still heaps more trouble than not bothering in the first place ;)
The trouble is that if you start letting users make design decisions without contributing code, then anyone who likes can barge into your forum and appoint themselves project manager. If that happens a few times, I can imagine people's patience wearing a little thin.
Mind, that does nothing to excuse bad manners or poor communication skills. But I think it's a mistake to conclude that the devs don't want the software to be useful. It's just that they have pretty clear cut ideas about how to make it useful.
mmm... but that's true of all software development, I think. People set out to write something that fits in with the way they work. We tend to have this subconscious arrogance that says that "If everyone worked the same way I work, they'd all be so much more productive. Therefore I will write this software to reflect my work patterns, and then they will all SEE! Bwha-ha-ha-ha!"
And sometimes they're right, more often they're wrong, and sometimes it falls in between and they get a niche following who find the software suits their work patterns as well. And that's OK in my book. Let Microsoft do the focus groups and the lowest common denominator interfaces. We can afford a little diversity.
Interesting, isn't it?
The FOSS devs are mainly interested in writing software people want to use. To that end they don't really care what platform their stuff runs on, so long as people find it useful.
Microsoft on the other hand approach the problem from the opposite direction. They don't really care whether people find their software particularly useful or not, so long as they can destroy all the alternatives. You could hardly ask for a more succinct summary of the difference between the two camps.
As an aside, wasn't Hilf supposed to be from a FOSS background, back before MS hired him as their Open Source Guy? Seems either he never really understood FOSS, or else he's just been at MS so long that's gone native.
I wonder which is is: "has been" or "never was" :)
Then again, as I understand it, gamers aren't the target audience. The reason that NVidia wrote Linux drivers in the first place was that Hollywood CGI shops like Industrial Light and Magic had a big investment in *nix apps. NVidia more or less inherited that business from Silicon Graphics, but they weren't going to keep it long unless they came up with drivers that worked on Linux.
Now (again, as I understand it) NVidia gets enough of an income stream from that business to make it worthwhile keeping a Linux team on the payroll. ATI came late to the party, and their Linux driver were more an attempt to break into the market, but they never generated enough income to support a full time dev team like at NVidia. WHich is one reason why AIT Linux drivers were often late in being released and buggy in comparison to NVidia's offering.
That's also why it makes sense for ATI to open their driver source code. They can't maintain the code base themselves, at least not well enough to keep up with NVidia and kernel developments both. On the other hand, the penny seems to have finally dropped that maybe they don't have to.
At worst, this gives them something comparable to NVidia. The open factor is probably going to make ATI a lot more attractive to the Linux geeks at the various render farms. And, you know, they might even see some income from Linux desktops as well. Certainly, if they pull this off, I'll have bought my last NVidia card.