When steamboat willies goes into PD, anyone can upload it to youtube. Anyone can make movies about a dancing mouse on a steamboat, and even use the same music that it's paired with it etc. But that mouse still can't *be* Mickey Mouse; nor so similar as to be confused with Mickey Mouse.
If the geek were honest about the thing, what he has in Steamboat Willie is simply a tech demo of synchronized sound. The only other reason to watch it is to see Mickey, Minnie and Pete in their earliest, but still recognizable, form. Now fixed and trademarked.
This is why the Disney thing becomes key, because any new work featuring Mickey Mouse is -- technically -- a derivative work of Steamboat Willlie.
What you get with the expiration of the copyright on Steamboat Willie is the right to produce derivatives of Steamboat Willie. Eight minutes of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track and a thin narrative thread, with a steamboat as your principal stage set and prop.
What you don't get are to the rights to the trademarked character designs or the rights to produce derivatives based on the hundreds (?) of films, comic strips, children's story books, radio and television productions and video games that would come later.
How does cheap technology like this mesh with Bill Gates's dream of putting a computer in every home, and projects like OLPC?
The geek can't let go of the media lab fantasy of a grade school classroom without teachers. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence that introducing tech at this level is of any value whatever.
I am asking Dell to ship laptops. with no OS encumbrances. No MS tax.
The geek has been whining about this since the nineties and the answer is always the same. The mass market shopper in his tens of millions buys nothing but the plug-and-play product.
The "known good" balanced and tested configuration of hardware and software that will meet his expectations of price and performance without hassle --- and can be returned for refund or exchange under warranty if it doesn't.
Walmart, with its enormous purchasing power, wasted about ten years trying to find a credible Linux system that could be sold and serviced for significantly less than the budget HP or Dell desktop. Nothing ever came of it.
The real meaning of the M$ tax is that the product that sells in very small numbers will always be always harder to find and cost you more.
The geek's technical and ecological arguments count for nothing if you have lost faith in those who were responsible for the safety of nuclear power both in private industry and in government.
To the geek who can't resist the suggestion that the right solution in this situation is to migrate Mom & Dad to Linux, the Chromebook or Apple:
a reminder that Windows 95 launched 20 years ago.
Long enough for even the least tech-savvy of users to become comfortable with a broad range of skills, programs and services that are not easily transferable to other platforms.
The UNIX philosophy was always groups of simple tools that do one thing and do it well. You pipe them together and parse the data however you want. Systemd does the exact opposite of that. One monolithic service doing everything but poorly.
If you build systemd with all configuration options enabled you will build 69 individual binaries. These binaries all serve different tasks, and are neatly separated for a number of reasons.
A package involving 69 individual binaries can hardly be called monolithic. What is different from prior solutions however, is that we ship more components in a single tarball, and maintain them upstream in a single repository with a unified release cycle.
Much of the debate about systemd is academic at this point because here's a truth that you'll discover in Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04, and just about every other major distro around: systemd is here.
Red Hat is the inventor and primary booster of systemd, so the best distros for playing with it are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL clones like CentOS and Scientific Linux, and of course good ole Fedora Linux, which always ships with the latest, greatest, and bleeding-edgiest.
You're right in that air conditioning is technically a subset of refrigeration, but I don't think that air conditioning really revolutionized society (or disrupted) in the same sense here, so that's why it's not included or mentioned here.
There were vast regions in the southern and southwestern United States that remained essentially rural until air conditioning made them habitable year round.
The population of Houston in 1920 was about 138,000. In 2010, 2 million.
You notice the word "limited" has pretty much been ignored, too.
The founders were not micro-managers.
The limits of copyright were meant to be defined by legislation.
The average length of a state constitution is 26,000 words (compared to about 8,700 words for the U.S. constitution). The longest state governing document is that of Alabama, which has over 172,000 words. That document is also the most amended state constitution in the Union, with over 770 amendments. The average state constitution has been amended about 115 times. The oldest state constitution still in effect is that of Massachusetts, which took effect in 1780. The newest is the Georgia Constitution, which was ratified in 1983.
Georgia has had nine constitutions. Massachusetts one.
The success of the framers of the U.S. Constitution in writing a document geared to serving the varied and changing needs of Americans has been complemented by an ability on the part of successive Congresses and courts to readapt it to these changing demands. The Constitution's 27 amendments, added over a period of 200 years, have in most cases plugged minor loopholes rather than changed the focus or the general structure of the document. As Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, ''Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced.'' Constitution of the United States
"A modern computer without Cobol and Fortran is like a chocolate cake without the ketchup and mustard"
As Scott Colvey, a writer for The Guardian wrote in 2009, ''Cobol is to business what the combustion engine is to motoring: it has been around so long, and installed in so many places, that doing something different would be impossibly costly.''
Eighty percent of the world's daily business transactions rely on a 59-year-old programming language called Cobol, short for "Common Business Oriented Language." Global commerce depends so much on Cobol that if its' 220 billion lines of installed code were mysteriously erased business would be catapulted back to the "B-Commerce" era.
As in "barter."
If you run hardware long enough, it breaks. If you run software long enough, it works. Cobol works. As the CIO of a Fortune 350 firm who requested anonymity because he didn't want to be associated with a story about Cobol, told me, "Cobol is the most extraordinarily efficient programming language ever written."
Intellectual products are foremost on this list. Right now the favored approach is to try to "create" scarcity where it doesn't exist.
The geek never fails to seize the opportunity to conflate the creation and reproduction of digital media. In a live stage production it is always perfectly clear that talent and experience is a scarce commodity. That time and commitment is a scarce commodity.
The current path leads to dictatorship.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that there was no such thing as a working class writer before the modern era of copyright. No working class theater before the Nickelodeon.
In the past, the arts were supported by the state, the church and the merchant prince, and served their interests. Modern popular culture is, by definition, sustained by its audience, and has a much broader range of expression and purpose. The geek's talk of dictatorship is fundamentally nonsense.
Before the invention of money most systems seem to have been based on a gift economy, not barter.
DreamWorks' Dragons resurrected the old joke about the chieftain who arrived at a council meeting without the appropriate gifts and departed this world a head shorter.
"Bro" has also been used to suggest affection and intimacy across racial divisions that isn't really there.
The GIMP is the textbook example of the geek's ignorance of popular culture and usage and his uncanny ability to embrace every opportunity to reinforce the worst stereotypes of his own culture in ways that should be trivially easy to avoid.
The problem isn't to do with GM, it's to with the way profits are derived from GM.
The modern farmer is first and last a business man.
He specializes. He raises grains, fruits or vegetables for sale in the retail or wholesale markers he understands or he evolves into a seed company or a nursery. Never both, because the labor and capital requirements are so very different and so very demanding.
When he buys seed from Monsanto, he is looking at the return on his investment, as any business man must. He is looking at how the product stands up against the competition. If it is sweet corn, he is looking at color and flavor. Yields. Resistance to insects, drought and disease.
The price of seed isn't what keeps a farmer awake nights. It is the environmental variables which can destroy any hope of a successful ---- profitable --- harvest.
Prior to the rise of advertising, almost all sites were 'independent.'
---- and you discovered them by thumbing through the printed pages of the modestly sized Internet Yellow Pages, guide books and magazines of the era..
It was a geek paradise defined off-campus by the limits of the dial-up modem, arcane and frustrating client software and services that were only beginning to offer affordable flat-rate monthly billing,
Worldwide usage of Windows 10 in its first calendar month (August) was 4.9% compared to 1% for Windows 8 and 4.1% for Windows 7 after their first complete month.
No, that only proves that its competitors are doing the popular thing. What's popular is usually inane and stupid.
The beauty of this argument is that it spares the geek the need to look at the failures of Linux as a desktop OS critically. "Inane and stupid" is, after all, generally a pretty good description of the futile and unpopular.
I've yet to see a single stat which suggests that Linux as a desktop OS is gaining any traction whatsoever. Which tells me that its competitors are doing most things right.
I get it that the geek dislikes the alleged "inefficiency:' of languages that are inherently and compellingly pictographic. But his objections to the use of the humble emoji to enliven conversations over what can still be very pricey low bandwidth connections makes no sense.
The rebus is four centuries old in the western world; typographic art and the emoticon as old the printing press. When Unicode opens the door to greater fun and play in the use of language and pictures, I am all for it.
Edison didn't invent the light bulb -- he invented a way to make it cheaply (no platinum) and last longer.
The Edison light bulb could be wired in parallel. The single most significant step forward and the one most easily forgotten. Lights could now be individually controlled and the failure of a single bulb wouldn't plunge you into the dark.
Liberal arts majors have not been trained to think logically and solve problems.
The liberal arts deal fundamentally with the human equation.
The engineer of the late 1950s plans a multi-lane expressway downtown.
He tunes out anyone who complains that the waterfront would be severed from the city, healthy neighborhoods splintered or paved over and the poor walled in. He also ignores any objections that the signature sky-way to be built over the harbor would become insanely dangerous to drive in winter and prohibitively expense to maintain.
He is blind to the social consequences of his actions. His designs are technically sound --- but only in the narrow sense that his sky-way won't collapse in a heavy wind. It won't be navigable by anything less than a convoy with an army reserve escort, but at least it won't fall down.
Also, I have no interest whatsoever in hiring "well-rounded" employees. They may be better people, and engage in interesting conversation at the water cooler, but they are not better employees, and are not going to add as much to the bottom line as a workaholic nerd with no social life.
The bottom line depends on your ability to conceive, produce and maintain a marketable product or service. You don't expect an alcoholic to be creative, productive, or self-disciplined. Obsession does not yield clarity.
The only virtue of a workaholic nerd is that he is easily and cheaply replaced as soon as he burns out.
Slashdot Mirror
When steamboat willies goes into PD, anyone can upload it to youtube. Anyone can make movies about a dancing mouse on a steamboat, and even use the same music that it's paired with it etc. But that mouse still can't *be* Mickey Mouse; nor so similar as to be confused with Mickey Mouse.
Disney posted Steamboat Willie to You Tube in 2009.
If the geek were honest about the thing, what he has in Steamboat Willie is simply a tech demo of synchronized sound. The only other reason to watch it is to see Mickey, Minnie and Pete in their earliest, but still recognizable, form. Now fixed and trademarked.
This is why the Disney thing becomes key, because any new work featuring Mickey Mouse is -- technically -- a derivative work of Steamboat Willlie.
What you get with the expiration of the copyright on Steamboat Willie is the right to produce derivatives of Steamboat Willie. Eight minutes of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track and a thin narrative thread, with a steamboat as your principal stage set and prop.
What you don't get are to the rights to the trademarked character designs or the rights to produce derivatives based on the hundreds (?) of films, comic strips, children's story books, radio and television productions and video games that would come later.
How does cheap technology like this mesh with Bill Gates's dream of putting a computer in every home, and projects like OLPC?
The geek can't let go of the media lab fantasy of a grade school classroom without teachers. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence that introducing tech at this level is of any value whatever.
I am asking Dell to ship laptops. with no OS encumbrances. No MS tax.
The geek has been whining about this since the nineties and the answer is always the same. The mass market shopper in his tens of millions buys nothing but the plug-and-play product.
The "known good" balanced and tested configuration of hardware and software that will meet his expectations of price and performance without hassle --- and can be returned for refund or exchange under warranty if it doesn't.
Walmart, with its enormous purchasing power, wasted about ten years trying to find a credible Linux system that could be sold and serviced for significantly less than the budget HP or Dell desktop. Nothing ever came of it.
The real meaning of the M$ tax is that the product that sells in very small numbers will always be always harder to find and cost you more.
The geek's technical and ecological arguments count for nothing if you have lost faith in those who were responsible for the safety of nuclear power both in private industry and in government.
To the geek who can't resist the suggestion that the right solution in this situation is to migrate Mom & Dad to Linux, the Chromebook or Apple:
a reminder that Windows 95 launched 20 years ago.
Long enough for even the least tech-savvy of users to become comfortable with a broad range of skills, programs and services that are not easily transferable to other platforms.
The UNIX philosophy was always groups of simple tools that do one thing and do it well. You pipe them together and parse the data however you want. Systemd does the exact opposite of that. One monolithic service doing everything but poorly.
If you build systemd with all configuration options enabled you will build 69 individual binaries. These binaries all serve different tasks, and are neatly separated for a number of reasons.
A package involving 69 individual binaries can hardly be called monolithic. What is different from prior solutions however, is that we ship more components in a single tarball, and maintain them upstream in a single repository with a unified release cycle.
The Biggest Myths
[2013]
You're beta testing this bullshit.
Then you are in damn good company.
Much of the debate about systemd is academic at this point because here's a truth that you'll discover in Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04, and just about every other major distro around: systemd is here.
Debian 8: Linux's most reliable distro makes its biggest change since 1993 [May 1, 2015]
Red Hat is the inventor and primary booster of systemd, so the best distros for playing with it are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL clones like CentOS and Scientific Linux, and of course good ole Fedora Linux, which always ships with the latest, greatest, and bleeding-edgiest.
Understanding and using Systemd
You're right in that air conditioning is technically a subset of refrigeration, but I don't think that air conditioning really revolutionized society (or disrupted) in the same sense here, so that's why it's not included or mentioned here.
There were vast regions in the southern and southwestern United States that remained essentially rural until air conditioning made them habitable year round.
The population of Houston in 1920 was about 138,000. In 2010, 2 million.
You notice the word "limited" has pretty much been ignored, too.
The founders were not micro-managers.
The limits of copyright were meant to be defined by legislation.
The average length of a state constitution is 26,000 words (compared to about 8,700 words for the U.S. constitution). The longest state governing document is that of Alabama, which has over 172,000 words. That document is also the most amended state constitution in the Union, with over 770 amendments. The average state constitution has been amended about 115 times. The oldest state constitution still in effect is that of Massachusetts, which took effect in 1780. The newest is the Georgia Constitution, which was ratified in 1983.
Georgia has had nine constitutions. Massachusetts one.
State constitution
The success of the framers of the U.S. Constitution in writing a document geared to serving the varied and changing needs of Americans has been complemented by an ability on the part of successive Congresses and courts to readapt it to these changing demands. The Constitution's 27 amendments, added over a period of 200 years, have in most cases plugged minor loopholes rather than changed the focus or the general structure of the document. As Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, ''Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced.'' Constitution of the United States
It's pretty obvious that many of us are not used to the idea, and block them completely.
The real question is "How many are blocking adds completely?"
The problem with a forum like Slashdot is that there is never any feedback from the greater mass of users.
"A modern computer without Cobol and Fortran is like a chocolate cake without the ketchup and mustard"
As Scott Colvey, a writer for The Guardian wrote in 2009, ''Cobol is to business what the combustion engine is to motoring: it has been around so long, and installed in so many places, that doing something different would be impossibly costly.''
Eighty percent of the world's daily business transactions rely on a 59-year-old programming language called Cobol, short for "Common Business Oriented Language." Global commerce depends so much on Cobol that if its' 220 billion lines of installed code were mysteriously erased business would be catapulted back to the "B-Commerce" era.
As in "barter."
If you run hardware long enough, it breaks. If you run software long enough, it works. Cobol works. As the CIO of a Fortune 350 firm who requested anonymity because he didn't want to be associated with a story about Cobol, told me, "Cobol is the most extraordinarily efficient programming language ever written."
Cobol Is Dead. Long Live Cobol!
[Oct 2. 2014]
Intellectual products are foremost on this list. Right now the favored approach is to try to "create" scarcity where it doesn't exist.
The geek never fails to seize the opportunity to conflate the creation and reproduction of digital media. In a live stage production it is always perfectly clear that talent and experience is a scarce commodity. That time and commitment is a scarce commodity.
The current path leads to dictatorship.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that there was no such thing as a working class writer before the modern era of copyright. No working class theater before the Nickelodeon.
In the past, the arts were supported by the state, the church and the merchant prince, and served their interests. Modern popular culture is, by definition, sustained by its audience, and has a much broader range of expression and purpose. The geek's talk of dictatorship is fundamentally nonsense.
Before the invention of money most systems seem to have been based on a gift economy, not barter.
DreamWorks' Dragons resurrected the old joke about the chieftain who arrived at a council meeting without the appropriate gifts and departed this world a head shorter.
Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties.
An alpha male idiot.
Bro, The Bro Code
"Bro" has also been used to suggest affection and intimacy across racial divisions that isn't really there.
The GIMP is the textbook example of the geek's ignorance of popular culture and usage and his uncanny ability to embrace every opportunity to reinforce the worst stereotypes of his own culture in ways that should be trivially easy to avoid.
The problem isn't to do with GM, it's to with the way profits are derived from GM.
The modern farmer is first and last a business man.
He specializes. He raises grains, fruits or vegetables for sale in the retail or wholesale markers he understands or he evolves into a seed company or a nursery. Never both, because the labor and capital requirements are so very different and so very demanding.
When he buys seed from Monsanto, he is looking at the return on his investment, as any business man must. He is looking at how the product stands up against the competition. If it is sweet corn, he is looking at color and flavor. Yields. Resistance to insects, drought and disease.
The price of seed isn't what keeps a farmer awake nights. It is the environmental variables which can destroy any hope of a successful ---- profitable --- harvest.
Prior to the rise of advertising, almost all sites were 'independent.'
---- and you discovered them by thumbing through the printed pages of the modestly sized Internet Yellow Pages, guide books and magazines of the era..
It was a geek paradise defined off-campus by the limits of the dial-up modem, arcane and frustrating client software and services that were only beginning to offer affordable flat-rate monthly billing,
Did I really just see a "Paid Post" from Amazon embedded with the stories on Slashdot's front page?
As if IoT wasn't insecure enough already - let's put the BIGGEST consumer malware target into everything!
You could make a damn good case that malware is a far bigger problem for Android than Win 10 in any of its many incarnations.
What do they think moving to Win 10 will be like?
A piece of cake?
In Steam's August Hardware and Software Survey,16% of Steam gamers were running 64 Bit Win 10, a bare 0.92% Linux. Steam Hardware and Software Survey: August 2015
Worldwide usage of Windows 10 in its first calendar month (August) was 4.9% compared to 1% for Windows 8 and 4.1% for Windows 7 after their first complete month.
Windows 10 first month worldwide usage well ahead of that recorded by Windows 8
No, that only proves that its competitors are doing the popular thing. What's popular is usually inane and stupid.
The beauty of this argument is that it spares the geek the need to look at the failures of Linux as a desktop OS critically. "Inane and stupid" is, after all, generally a pretty good description of the futile and unpopular.
The easiest way is just don't install this craptastic pile of shit in the first place.
Steam Hardware and Software Survey August 2015
Linux, All Flavors 0.92%
Windows 10 64 Bit 16%
I've yet to see a single stat which suggests that Linux as a desktop OS is gaining any traction whatsoever. Which tells me that its competitors are doing most things right.
I get it that the geek dislikes the alleged "inefficiency:' of languages that are inherently and compellingly pictographic. But his objections to the use of the humble emoji to enliven conversations over what can still be very pricey low bandwidth connections makes no sense.
The rebus is four centuries old in the western world; typographic art and the emoticon as old the printing press. When Unicode opens the door to greater fun and play in the use of language and pictures, I am all for it.
Edison didn't invent the light bulb -- he invented a way to make it cheaply (no platinum) and last longer.
The Edison light bulb could be wired in parallel. The single most significant step forward and the one most easily forgotten. Lights could now be individually controlled and the failure of a single bulb wouldn't plunge you into the dark.
>Please don't run executable code inside my document viewer.
The mainstream web browser ceased to be a simple document viewer a long time back. The browser is an ananomoly
Liberal arts majors have not been trained to think logically and solve problems.
The liberal arts deal fundamentally with the human equation.
The engineer of the late 1950s plans a multi-lane expressway downtown.
He tunes out anyone who complains that the waterfront would be severed from the city, healthy neighborhoods splintered or paved over and the poor walled in. He also ignores any objections that the signature sky-way to be built over the harbor would become insanely dangerous to drive in winter and prohibitively expense to maintain.
He is blind to the social consequences of his actions. His designs are technically sound --- but only in the narrow sense that his sky-way won't collapse in a heavy wind. It won't be navigable by anything less than a convoy with an army reserve escort, but at least it won't fall down.
Also, I have no interest whatsoever in hiring "well-rounded" employees. They may be better people, and engage in interesting conversation at the water cooler, but they are not better employees, and are not going to add as much to the bottom line as a workaholic nerd with no social life.
The bottom line depends on your ability to conceive, produce and maintain a marketable product or service. You don't expect an alcoholic to be creative, productive, or self-disciplined. Obsession does not yield clarity.
The only virtue of a workaholic nerd is that he is easily and cheaply replaced as soon as he burns out.