I am not normally this brusque, but I think the occasion so merits. Are you misinformed or simply incredibly stupid?
I simply cannot understand how all iTunes (a free download) users could be iPod users (an expensive peripheral). Given that iTunes is bundled with the iPod rather than vice versa, and that unless you are particularly political in your choice of OS, the iPod as-good-as requires iTunes as its computer-to-peripheral interface, how can iPod > iTunes?
Further, you seem to suggest that iTunes requires you to buy all the music stored therein. I am worried that their are people reading this site who are this uninformed. My iTunes Library is full of >20Gb worth of MP3s, mostly ripped from CDs - I have one iTunes Music Store-bought AAC file. Therefore those who "choose not to pay fees to download music" (i.e. those who download MP3s) will find iTunes an excellent interface for their "borrowed" collection.
...they've had mandatory clicky-clicky noises for ages.
But it's quite a famous problem there - women being felt up on busy trains, the upskirt photos and so on. Here in the UK, if a bloke did that, it'd be prison, pure and simple. People just don't really do that kind of thing.
Groups calling for this are the same kind of idiots who, when all else fails, will simply wail "Won't somebody please think of the children!"
Speaking as a Brit myself, it always amuses me how the Yanks opine RIAA profits and excessive CD prices. It is not uncommon for us to pay £12.99 ($23) or £13.99 ($25) for a CD here, as you note - if prices dropped to more reasonable levels (i.e. £5 or £8), CD sales would skyrocket and remain high for quite some considerable time, I would think.
Of course, it's always been that way in the UK. You can get better prices by using mailorder, which brings things down to the £7-£8 mark, but you may have to add delivery costs and will certainly have to wait some time for the items to get to you. There is none of the instant gratification of just buying the item there and then in a shop, unless you are prepared to pay twice the price for it.
Same goes for computer bits, of course. In Japan, I could walk into a shop and pay mail order prices and walk out with the product. In England, I have to pay delivery and wait at least until the next day.
Of course, fact is that the British just love to complain. We are incomplete without something to bitch about. If CD prices were lower, we'd bitch about the fact that we can't bitch about the high price of CDs.
Is it really that easy to put a monetary value on Linux though? It's such a nebulous thing, having so many contributors and being quite an important unifying thread for so many dissatisfied technorati.
What I'm trying to suggest is that, like the works of Van Gogh or Matisse, Linux is perhaps greater than the sum of its parts. Even if you were to cleanroom reimplement Linux, that only takes care of the engineering side. We live in a world where intellectual property is king, so shouldn't some financial regard be given to the sometimes simply wonderful ideas, the ways of doing things, and so on.
As Microsoft may well find out in the years ahead, you just can't buy the kind of dedication for and belief in some of the open source projects out there. True, most people do have a price, but they will work harder and better when working for themselves.
Can't agree with you there. From my experience, most young Japanese think nothing of downloading music, films...whatever - it's what high speed fibre connections are for!
The Japanese are traditionally very obedient, it is true, and there is very little market for counterfeit goods, but that doesn't extend to P2P on the Internet, because it feels that much more abstracted (and is totally free) - same as everywhere else.
I wonder if I am the only one who, holding his 2G iPod in one and and browsing Slashdot and actually RTFA, tut-tutted and felt the need to post a correction to the glaring error in this article. Clearly our correspondent is not as au fait with the iPod as he might appear to be...
Quoth the article:
"As you can see in the image to the right, the scrollwheels from the second- and third-generation iPods keep that radical-looking design, and you can see where the four touch-sensitive buttons line the area between the scrollwheel and the screen."
This in itself is not incriminating, but does betray a certain fault in the author's knowledge - it implies that the second generation iPod has touch-sensitive buttons. Further down the article...
"To me, this was a huge design improvement, because the 2G/3G iPods' touch-sensitive playback controls didn't offer any feedback to the finger."
...and we have the crux of the issue. As those few (or not so few) early adopters will tell you, proud as they are with their 10 and 20Gb bricks, the 2G iPod has proper buttons with finger feedback, because the only difference between the 1G and 2G iPods is that whilst the former's wheel moved, the latter's was touch sensitive. The buttons stayed the same. It was not until the 3G iPod that the touch-sensitive buttons were introduced, erroneously in my opinion (for the same reason cited in the article - that they give no tactile feedback).
Anyway, just thought that that little nugget ought to be noted for the record.
As a Brit and thus, out of obligation/duty/whatever and due to inclement weather, a bitter cynic, I can only laugh derisively at this news and observe that this is the way it always was, is and forever will be.
Some here have failed to grasp VAT - I can only assume that these people are communists, unfamiliar with taxation systems and the exchange of money for goods. (And, as an aside, should the HUAC get wind of this - you know, harbouring socialists and what have you - CowboyNeal can expect the FBI on his ass. Metaphorically speaking, of course.)
Others note a strong pound juxtaposed against a weak Euro or dollar, placing their faith in the fluctuation of international currency to balance the situation. I await with some glee the comedown of the pound - in the dollar's case, this necessitates a change of president, I believe, and, alas, in the Euro's case, nothing short of a blue moon.
The thing is, the UK is fundamentally different from the rest of Europe, a state of affairs brought about more by geography than anything else (the Japanese are similarly afflicted). It will not change. To cite two factors - VAT is lower than the French rate of 19.5% or the Italian one of 20% (if memory serves - corrections welcome) and employment legislation is more company-friendly (contrast our 48 hour working week with France's 35 and note that the Netherlands' figure is similar) - and yet British prices still manage to consistently exceed their continental equivalents - cars have always been a stellar example.
None of this matters though. Britain is, perhaps by statute, more expensive than pretty much anywhere else - this cynic includes Japan in that sweeping generalisation having had ample opportunity for comparison. In fact, it is surprising that this has got as far as the OFT - normally the Beeb is only able to whet the skeptic's appetite for feeling hard-done-by with stories of complaints by consumers' rights organisations.
As many a FOSS geek has argued, information wants to be free. The Internet is perhaps both the cause and effect of this little maxim. As has been noted elsewhere in the discussion, the protocols that make the Net are not particularly good at things like verification, authenticity, trust, etc. You know, all the things that are necessary in a cutthroat capitalist world...
So if we take this anarchy as something of a fait accompli, then where we go from here kind of depends on where you stand on the issue of, well, free.
I'm no anarchist, but country blacklisting seems a little over the top, a tad heavy-handed, if you will. Granted, these countries might produce more than a small amount of slurry, but that is the inherent problem with freedom - you might not like what comes out. It's like the people who get scared about Freenet and the idea that child porn might travel over their wires. This might be a little of an extreme example but the point is the same.
Not a few people have lamented that the problem with the Internet is it allows every man his voice - ugh, it sounds awful, doesn't it!? So democratic.
I'm not pro-spam. Depending on my mood, I can ache for the pre-commercial glory days of the Internet. But this is what it is now - pig shit that we have to roll around in. I just don't think that anyone has the right to silence someone else's voice because of the actions of a third party.
It's also interesting to note what a peculiar façade the Manufacturers Exporters Directory Global Worldwide Association, or whatever, is. Any site that uses Babelfish to offer translation is, in my book, seriously lacking in credibility. It is rather evocative of those irritating placeholder sites you sometimes get to when you type a URL slightly wrong. Furthermore, calling itself a bureau and using the eagle in its logo it downright misleading.
I don't know where the Slashdot crowd stands on free speech, but the crock of shit we are discussing at the moment is not in a small part America-made. It's the World Wide Web, people. Don't forget that.
Unsure of how to comment, but knowing only that the inner me is harbouring negative emotions for the RIAA and their ilk, I can only say that I am staggered although, strangely at the same time, not particularly surprised.
As others have I am sure noted, although the bravado (i.e. lawsuits) is well-publicised, this is a front for the reality that they are very scared about the future of their now obsolete business model. This action is either a continuation of this same bravado, or utter greed/stupidity on their part.
I will freely admit that I want to listen to some of the content that their groups produce, howsoever they may have obtained it (heavy-handed contracts, extortion, etc.). I personally believe that a little bit is actually quite good (there is no accounting for taste). However, I am customer and as such, the free market (which true capitalists love so much) should decide. They are asking me to pay $1.25 for 128kbps AAC when I can have 320kbps MP3 for free. The market has decided. My wallet's status - intact.
The consolation is that this utter farce cannot and will not go on. The cartel's attempts to make information a totally pay-per-play-based good will fail in the long run - there is enough historical evidence to suggest that this is inevitable. But, wow, in the meantime, if this kind of thing is their game, I have one recourse to suggest to all those who currently frequent iTMS - c'mon guys, P2P is ready to welcome you back with open arms!
iqu:(
(In truth, I am British, so I have never actually been able to sample the delights of the iTMS firsthand anyway, but I can tell you, if I could - although one can guarantee that at British prices, I would be reluctant to do so in the first place - I would not continue to do so in light of these actions.)
Another day, another example of the cavalier attitude that Robertson has regarding IP, the community, everything...
Michael Robertson is a strange creature, bucking the trend like Steve Jobs, but only in very, very bad ways. The funny thing is (funny in a really perverse kind of way), Jobs is generally the guy Linux zealots love to hate (he was the cool kid in school). Robertson is the Linux-popularising martyr for FOSS, the almost untouchable.
Back in the day, MP3.com was lauded as visionary, a chance for the music companies to make something of online distribution, and so on. When the RIAA poo-pooed this and went after MP3.com, he played the prima donna and we all boohooed together - Michael tried so hard, he really cared about us, he identified with us, he wanted to free intellectual property. He was on our side. When MP3.com died, defeat reverberated around the geek/FOSS world...
So then this thing Lindows appears on the horizon, with talk of full Windows application compatibility, something that was later dropped when the WINE team realised what a prick Robertson was. When any other company makes crazy claims like that, someone will get on the case. In this case, the Lindows team rewrote history to erase this little hiccup from their PR. There are murmurs on the Internet about how source is not posted and so on, but somehow Lindows carries on.
Then Robertson takes on Microsoft. Robertson is the Man again, the Good Guy fighting against every true geek's arch nemesis. When he loses, Microsoft are evil bastards beyond reproach (I am not suggesting that this isn't the case, but bear with me...).
I think perhaps this could be put a clearer way - ask yourself only "Is my enemy's enemy always my friend, no matter what?" Personally, my answer to that would be no, but I suppose YMMV. Put it this way, I have no desire to ally myself with a person whose sole motivation to free the world from the shackles of IP (which would of course undermine the GPL) serves only to allow him to continue to profit off the unpaid labour of others.
Robertson is not a visionary. He's the asshole who was never tough enough to beat all us Slashdot-reading geeks up, but never missed the opportunity to hurl abuse from just round the corner. And he strikes me as being from the same sort of management school as McBride - his ethics are about as loose.
I think it will be pretty difficult for the free software community to catch up to what they're doing.
Surely the very thing that Microsoft are doing is playing catchup with Linux/BSD and Mac OS X!? Plus, er, WinFS is being dropped from Longhorn. Taking too long, they said. I don't know about any of the rest.
I'm not too worried yet though. Tempting though this might Windows make, there's still the politics/religion which holds Microsoft as the antichrist and the fact that for a gay geek like myself, Mac OS X fits the bill a hell of a lot better (pretty and useful!).
However, if Microsoft makes a really attractive platform for FOSS, it has the potential to create a quite different situation to the one we have today, where Microsoft is a champion of closed source cathedral-style development and Linux et al being the antithesis to that. Sure, there is FOSS software for Windows today, but it is not as common and generally more of a curiosity. How many people have the development tools to compile FOSS Win32 applications?
It carries, perhaps, the possibility of splitting the community up somewhat (between the hardcore zealots and those who just like FOSS). The important thing for Microsoft will be, as ever, dominance of the Windows platform, no matter what software users are running on it.
The objective of this is not too hard to discern - keep the geeks and individual developers on the Windows platform. It runs in the same vein as their licensing and releasing Services for UNIX - essentially an admission that CMD.EXE is not everyone's cup of tea as a command interpreter and that, to be frank, for proper scripting, it's actually pretty shit.
I'm not quite sure where they'll go next. They may be following Apple's lead, who have, with Mac OS X, managed to capture an extremely sizeable proportion of the more moneyed developer market by taking advantage of the UNIX foundation and integrating it nicely. It may be that the next thing we'll see is a freebie X11 client.
These kind of things start to make Windows an interesting platform - a closed and, possibly, insecure and buggy base but with some interesting and certainly useful FOSS bolt-ons to make it an extremely compatible platform - imagine having both the traditional Win32 and FOSS software libraries available with little to no portage required! It's a perfect situation for Microsoft - keep the users on Windows (DRMed up and whatever), but appease those who are tempted to switch to Linux by building the best bits right into their current platform.
Apple does a good job here with their System Preferences.
On my iBooks, I have a firewall configured the old-fashioned way - using pico:P. If I try to tinker with the firewall using the relevant Preference Pane, I am warned that other firewall software is in use on the machine and that I cannot configure the firewall using Apple's pretty GUI unless I sort this out first. This basic level of protection can't be hard to do.
A better thing would of course be to get the GUI to be kind to custom-written configuration files, but this could be quite hard to do.
I'm still maintaining my line that a lot of Linux is catchup, certainly in the GUI arena, but your latest post has given me at the very least pause for thought and made me think why I love open source/UNIX so much.
I suppose the place where the real innovation is is in these little "intellectual challenges," as you put it. Linux's out-of-the-box hardware support is unrivalled (Windows XP can't begin to match it), and for me, the best thing about the open source UNIXes (and in this I include Mac OS X) is the "little" things that you can do with it. Would anyone like to explain to me how I could tunnel PPP over SSH on Windows? (I only mention this one, because I do it on a regular basis between Japan and the UK, and it uses all those clever UNIX things like, well, SSH, TTYs, a PPP daemon whose output is easily redirected, etc.)
Darl McBride types might ask what the point is. McBride would doubtless be asking how he could "monetize" [sic] your temperature sensors or a kernel-level driver for games consoles' controllers. Of course, truth is you can't put a monetary value on it, but it's wonderful all the same.
And is this innovation? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps it's just building on the immensely flexible and simple nature of the UNIX(-like) base that these operating systems adopt and some of the stuff is not particularly groundbreaking, but it is useful to a few of us. It's never going to help make FOSS mainstream, mostly because it's not really marketable, but is one of its greatest strengths.
Your first paragraph entirely misses the point of my post. And at no point did I suggest that Microsoft didn't copy their whole UI from, well, whoever (anyway, it is irrelevant). And in response to...
"As a competative company you should be looking at what your rivals are doing and then providing them for your customers."
...I would first offer...
"Aside from the feuding and pettiness that detracts from the quality of some projects... there is some great work being done. Why do we keep settling for good enough?"
A truly competitive company innovates - the only reason Apple are still extant in these days of Microsoft hegemony is because they innovate like fuck. If OSS was similarly innovative, it would enjoy wider usage already. What is the point of moving to a lookalike that cannot run your applications? (Linux, of course, has other real, geniune strengths, but the UI side is not one of them).
And nor was I arguing with the actual content of the Slashdot story - more hardware support for Linux is great - but rather seconding the parent thread, which in my view correctly opines the frustrating state of current OSS software development - neatly summed up as copy rather than create.
I have had a similar experience, I suppose, starting out on DOS/Win 3.11, moving through Windows 9x and then finding Linux as a hope-inspiring alternative back in, oooh, about 1998. And hell, it did suck then - when I first started using it, KDE1 was in alpha/beta, but hey, it was different, so that was enough.
But like you say, there is always the lingering hope that it will get better. One is content with what one has when one is running Linux because, well, it's not Microsoft and some stuff (e.g. GNOME 2.6) is really rather beautiful. But, as I have pointed out before and as you rightly say here, there's very little innovation - GNOME 2.6's much-needed replacement for the file dialogue boxes are straight from Apple and the spatial file browser is another old Apple trick. And of course the Start button (you can write whatever you like on it; it's always gonna be a Start button) is hardly an open source original.
I suppose the root of the problem is that most open source development is done by nerds, whose C or asm prowess is indubitable but whose understanding of the average user is minimal to non-existent. I am not wishing to berate these types, because the work they do is often superb, but I think we can easily conclude that:
Nerds cannot think like users and expect that every user should either work hard to understand the system or quite simply fuck off and not use their software;
Users' expectations are far too high from a bunch of tech-types who have no understanding of users' needs.
We keep talking about Linux on the desktop. GNOME is now ready for the desktop, but what does that actually mean? OK, so now Linux is as usable as Windows, but somebody whit here the other day, Windows is not exactly good enough for most users. Why else would it need such a big tech support team in every organisation?
Aside from the feuding and pettiness that detracts from the quality of some projects (I cite xMule vs. aMule and mplayer as current or past examples), there is some great work being done. Why do we keep settling for good enough?
As we've seen recently in Intel vs. China regarding China's own wireless standard (labelled GB15629.11-2003 for those interested), we can probably at least count on China to get hissy about this.
Simply put, whether the threat they perceive is real or not, there is no way they are going to allow American proprietary rubbish (with evil spyware code to boot) to penetrate the Peoples' Republic. So if we have to start importing all our parts from the commies, then so be it, but even if dumbass consumers in the West buy this kinda rubbish (and, as others have said, they undoubtedly will), it simply will not fly politically elsewhere.
The push for Linux in Asia is clear - HP are going to ship Linux boxen, China has variously shown its keenness towards the open OS, NTT DoCoMo are putting Linux in phones and so on - this kind of stuff really does matter. At the very least, American hardware manufacturers are going to consider the bigger picture before alienating large numbers of potential consumers.
Microsoft is not invincible. It has failed in the mobile phone market, failed to crush Java (now, of course, flourishing on mobiles) and has a long time to examine consumers' reactions before Longhorn comes out. I really don't think it will try to push this too hard...
This is rather OT, but it further ruins your three strikes theory, so...
Windows 3.x was not the first successful Windows - don't forget that it was not much more than an elaborate DOS shell with an API (as were Windows 9x/ME that followed) and that there were real alternatives back then - I cite OS/2 (which failed because IBM had no clue how to market to the consumer) and, of course, the Macintosh, whose GUI then was more refined and whose games were often graphically superior to their PC counterparts (the one I always think of is Prince of Persia, which run in glorious 640x480 on the Mac, as opposed to 320x240 on the PC).
Windows 95 is what did it for Microsoft, as it coincided rather nicely with the takeoff of the multimedia desktop PC. It rather killed the Mac, because it had decent multi-tasking, and it wasn't until about 1997-8, when PC hardware went through a really bad phase, that things started to get seriously unreliable and geeks started looking elsewhere...
Still, I will maintain the point that the average user doesn't even know what the command line is - forget a three word command, because you've lost him already.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not normally this brusque, but I think the occasion so merits. Are you misinformed or simply incredibly stupid?
:@
I simply cannot understand how all iTunes (a free download) users could be iPod users (an expensive peripheral). Given that iTunes is bundled with the iPod rather than vice versa, and that unless you are particularly political in your choice of OS, the iPod as-good-as requires iTunes as its computer-to-peripheral interface, how can iPod > iTunes?
Further, you seem to suggest that iTunes requires you to buy all the music stored therein. I am worried that their are people reading this site who are this uninformed. My iTunes Library is full of >20Gb worth of MP3s, mostly ripped from CDs - I have one iTunes Music Store-bought AAC file. Therefore those who "choose not to pay fees to download music" (i.e. those who download MP3s) will find iTunes an excellent interface for their "borrowed" collection.
Sorry for the tone, but sometimes...
iqu
...women being felt up on busy trains...
:s
To those confused, my implication was simply that this kind of sexual violation - be it physical or photographic - is common.
iqu
...they've had mandatory clicky-clicky noises for ages.
:)
But it's quite a famous problem there - women being felt up on busy trains, the upskirt photos and so on. Here in the UK, if a bloke did that, it'd be prison, pure and simple. People just don't really do that kind of thing.
Groups calling for this are the same kind of idiots who, when all else fails, will simply wail "Won't somebody please think of the children!"
iqu
Literacy is on the wane, it seems.
:D
Or is this interesting meshing of unequivocal and irrevocable actually new English? Dictionary.com begs to differ.
iqu
Hear hear!
:P
Speaking as a Brit myself, it always amuses me how the Yanks opine RIAA profits and excessive CD prices. It is not uncommon for us to pay £12.99 ($23) or £13.99 ($25) for a CD here, as you note - if prices dropped to more reasonable levels (i.e. £5 or £8), CD sales would skyrocket and remain high for quite some considerable time, I would think.
Of course, it's always been that way in the UK. You can get better prices by using mail order, which brings things down to the £7-£8 mark, but you may have to add delivery costs and will certainly have to wait some time for the items to get to you. There is none of the instant gratification of just buying the item there and then in a shop, unless you are prepared to pay twice the price for it.
Same goes for computer bits, of course. In Japan, I could walk into a shop and pay mail order prices and walk out with the product. In England, I have to pay delivery and wait at least until the next day.
Of course, fact is that the British just love to complain. We are incomplete without something to bitch about. If CD prices were lower, we'd bitch about the fact that we can't bitch about the high price of CDs.
iqu
Is it really that easy to put a monetary value on Linux though? It's such a nebulous thing, having so many contributors and being quite an important unifying thread for so many dissatisfied technorati.
:)
What I'm trying to suggest is that, like the works of Van Gogh or Matisse, Linux is perhaps greater than the sum of its parts. Even if you were to cleanroom reimplement Linux, that only takes care of the engineering side. We live in a world where intellectual property is king, so shouldn't some financial regard be given to the sometimes simply wonderful ideas, the ways of doing things, and so on.
As Microsoft may well find out in the years ahead, you just can't buy the kind of dedication for and belief in some of the open source projects out there. True, most people do have a price, but they will work harder and better when working for themselves.
iqu
Can't agree with you there. From my experience, most young Japanese think nothing of downloading music, films...whatever - it's what high speed fibre connections are for!
:|
The Japanese are traditionally very obedient, it is true, and there is very little market for counterfeit goods, but that doesn't extend to P2P on the Internet, because it feels that much more abstracted (and is totally free) - same as everywhere else.
iqu
I wonder if I am the only one who, holding his 2G iPod in one and and browsing Slashdot and actually RTFA, tut-tutted and felt the need to post a correction to the glaring error in this article. Clearly our correspondent is not as au fait with the iPod as he might appear to be...
...and we have the crux of the issue. As those few (or not so few) early adopters will tell you, proud as they are with their 10 and 20Gb bricks, the 2G iPod has proper buttons with finger feedback, because the only difference between the 1G and 2G iPods is that whilst the former's wheel moved, the latter's was touch sensitive. The buttons stayed the same. It was not until the 3G iPod that the touch-sensitive buttons were introduced, erroneously in my opinion (for the same reason cited in the article - that they give no tactile feedback).
Quoth the article:
"As you can see in the image to the right, the scrollwheels from the second- and third-generation iPods keep that radical-looking design, and you can see where the four touch-sensitive buttons line the area between the scrollwheel and the screen."
This in itself is not incriminating, but does betray a certain fault in the author's knowledge - it implies that the second generation iPod has touch-sensitive buttons. Further down the article...
"To me, this was a huge design improvement, because the 2G/3G iPods' touch-sensitive playback controls didn't offer any feedback to the finger."
Anyway, just thought that that little nugget ought to be noted for the record.
iqu =)
As a Brit and thus, out of obligation/duty/whatever and due to inclement weather, a bitter cynic, I can only laugh derisively at this news and observe that this is the way it always was, is and forever will be.
:s
Some here have failed to grasp VAT - I can only assume that these people are communists, unfamiliar with taxation systems and the exchange of money for goods. (And, as an aside, should the HUAC get wind of this - you know, harbouring socialists and what have you - CowboyNeal can expect the FBI on his ass. Metaphorically speaking, of course.)
Others note a strong pound juxtaposed against a weak Euro or dollar, placing their faith in the fluctuation of international currency to balance the situation. I await with some glee the comedown of the pound - in the dollar's case, this necessitates a change of president, I believe, and, alas, in the Euro's case, nothing short of a blue moon.
The thing is, the UK is fundamentally different from the rest of Europe, a state of affairs brought about more by geography than anything else (the Japanese are similarly afflicted). It will not change. To cite two factors - VAT is lower than the French rate of 19.5% or the Italian one of 20% (if memory serves - corrections welcome) and employment legislation is more company-friendly (contrast our 48 hour working week with France's 35 and note that the Netherlands' figure is similar) - and yet British prices still manage to consistently exceed their continental equivalents - cars have always been a stellar example.
None of this matters though. Britain is, perhaps by statute, more expensive than pretty much anywhere else - this cynic includes Japan in that sweeping generalisation having had ample opportunity for comparison. In fact, it is surprising that this has got as far as the OFT - normally the Beeb is only able to whet the skeptic's appetite for feeling hard-done-by with stories of complaints by consumers' rights organisations.
Nothing will change.
iqu
(If you like my cynical tone, feel free to read my sometimes-updated blog.)
As many a FOSS geek has argued, information wants to be free. The Internet is perhaps both the cause and effect of this little maxim. As has been noted elsewhere in the discussion, the protocols that make the Net are not particularly good at things like verification, authenticity, trust, etc. You know, all the things that are necessary in a cutthroat capitalist world...
:(
So if we take this anarchy as something of a fait accompli, then where we go from here kind of depends on where you stand on the issue of, well, free.
I'm no anarchist, but country blacklisting seems a little over the top, a tad heavy-handed, if you will. Granted, these countries might produce more than a small amount of slurry, but that is the inherent problem with freedom - you might not like what comes out. It's like the people who get scared about Freenet and the idea that child porn might travel over their wires. This might be a little of an extreme example but the point is the same.
Not a few people have lamented that the problem with the Internet is it allows every man his voice - ugh, it sounds awful, doesn't it!? So democratic.
I'm not pro-spam. Depending on my mood, I can ache for the pre-commercial glory days of the Internet. But this is what it is now - pig shit that we have to roll around in. I just don't think that anyone has the right to silence someone else's voice because of the actions of a third party.
It's also interesting to note what a peculiar façade the Manufacturers Exporters Directory Global Worldwide Association, or whatever, is. Any site that uses Babelfish to offer translation is, in my book, seriously lacking in credibility. It is rather evocative of those irritating placeholder sites you sometimes get to when you type a URL slightly wrong. Furthermore, calling itself a bureau and using the eagle in its logo it downright misleading.
I don't know where the Slashdot crowd stands on free speech, but the crock of shit we are discussing at the moment is not in a small part America-made. It's the World Wide Web, people. Don't forget that.
iqu
With a name like Viao, is this some kind of special Chinese-market-only product? I think Vaio sounds more likely...=)
:P
iqu
Unsure of how to comment, but knowing only that the inner me is harbouring negative emotions for the RIAA and their ilk, I can only say that I am staggered although, strangely at the same time, not particularly surprised.
:(
As others have I am sure noted, although the bravado (i.e. lawsuits) is well-publicised, this is a front for the reality that they are very scared about the future of their now obsolete business model. This action is either a continuation of this same bravado, or utter greed/stupidity on their part.
I will freely admit that I want to listen to some of the content that their groups produce, howsoever they may have obtained it (heavy-handed contracts, extortion, etc.). I personally believe that a little bit is actually quite good (there is no accounting for taste). However, I am customer and as such, the free market (which true capitalists love so much) should decide. They are asking me to pay $1.25 for 128kbps AAC when I can have 320kbps MP3 for free. The market has decided. My wallet's status - intact.
The consolation is that this utter farce cannot and will not go on. The cartel's attempts to make information a totally pay-per-play-based good will fail in the long run - there is enough historical evidence to suggest that this is inevitable. But, wow, in the meantime, if this kind of thing is their game, I have one recourse to suggest to all those who currently frequent iTMS - c'mon guys, P2P is ready to welcome you back with open arms!
iqu
(In truth, I am British, so I have never actually been able to sample the delights of the iTMS firsthand anyway, but I can tell you, if I could - although one can guarantee that at British prices, I would be reluctant to do so in the first place - I would not continue to do so in light of these actions.)
Plus he wore a bow tie in the 80s.
:s
He wore a bow tie!!??
iqu
Another day, another example of the cavalier attitude that Robertson has regarding IP, the community, everything...
:s
Michael Robertson is a strange creature, bucking the trend like Steve Jobs, but only in very, very bad ways. The funny thing is (funny in a really perverse kind of way), Jobs is generally the guy Linux zealots love to hate (he was the cool kid in school). Robertson is the Linux-popularising martyr for FOSS, the almost untouchable.
Back in the day, MP3.com was lauded as visionary, a chance for the music companies to make something of online distribution, and so on. When the RIAA poo-pooed this and went after MP3.com, he played the prima donna and we all boohooed together - Michael tried so hard, he really cared about us, he identified with us, he wanted to free intellectual property. He was on our side. When MP3.com died, defeat reverberated around the geek/FOSS world...
So then this thing Lindows appears on the horizon, with talk of full Windows application compatibility, something that was later dropped when the WINE team realised what a prick Robertson was. When any other company makes crazy claims like that, someone will get on the case. In this case, the Lindows team rewrote history to erase this little hiccup from their PR. There are murmurs on the Internet about how source is not posted and so on, but somehow Lindows carries on.
Then Robertson takes on Microsoft. Robertson is the Man again, the Good Guy fighting against every true geek's arch nemesis. When he loses, Microsoft are evil bastards beyond reproach (I am not suggesting that this isn't the case, but bear with me...).
I think perhaps this could be put a clearer way - ask yourself only "Is my enemy's enemy always my friend, no matter what?" Personally, my answer to that would be no, but I suppose YMMV. Put it this way, I have no desire to ally myself with a person whose sole motivation to free the world from the shackles of IP (which would of course undermine the GPL) serves only to allow him to continue to profit off the unpaid labour of others.
Robertson is not a visionary. He's the asshole who was never tough enough to beat all us Slashdot-reading geeks up, but never missed the opportunity to hurl abuse from just round the corner. And he strikes me as being from the same sort of management school as McBride - his ethics are about as loose.
iqu
I think it will be pretty difficult for the free software community to catch up to what they're doing.
:?
Surely the very thing that Microsoft are doing is playing catchup with Linux/BSD and Mac OS X!? Plus, er, WinFS is being dropped from Longhorn. Taking too long, they said. I don't know about any of the rest.
iqu
Dear Moderators,
:s
You suck.
This is flamebait.
iqu
I'm not too worried yet though. Tempting though this might Windows make, there's still the politics/religion which holds Microsoft as the antichrist and the fact that for a gay geek like myself, Mac OS X fits the bill a hell of a lot better (pretty and useful!).
:)
However, if Microsoft makes a really attractive platform for FOSS, it has the potential to create a quite different situation to the one we have today, where Microsoft is a champion of closed source cathedral-style development and Linux et al being the antithesis to that. Sure, there is FOSS software for Windows today, but it is not as common and generally more of a curiosity. How many people have the development tools to compile FOSS Win32 applications?
It carries, perhaps, the possibility of splitting the community up somewhat (between the hardcore zealots and those who just like FOSS). The important thing for Microsoft will be, as ever, dominance of the Windows platform, no matter what software users are running on it.
iqu
The objective of this is not too hard to discern - keep the geeks and individual developers on the Windows platform. It runs in the same vein as their licensing and releasing Services for UNIX - essentially an admission that CMD.EXE is not everyone's cup of tea as a command interpreter and that, to be frank, for proper scripting, it's actually pretty shit.
:)
I'm not quite sure where they'll go next. They may be following Apple's lead, who have, with Mac OS X, managed to capture an extremely sizeable proportion of the more moneyed developer market by taking advantage of the UNIX foundation and integrating it nicely. It may be that the next thing we'll see is a freebie X11 client.
These kind of things start to make Windows an interesting platform - a closed and, possibly, insecure and buggy base but with some interesting and certainly useful FOSS bolt-ons to make it an extremely compatible platform - imagine having both the traditional Win32 and FOSS software libraries available with little to no portage required! It's a perfect situation for Microsoft - keep the users on Windows (DRMed up and whatever), but appease those who are tempted to switch to Linux by building the best bits right into their current platform.
It's interesting, if nothing else...
iqu
Apple does a good job here with their System Preferences.
:P. If I try to tinker with the firewall using the relevant Preference Pane, I am warned that other firewall software is in use on the machine and that I cannot configure the firewall using Apple's pretty GUI unless I sort this out first. This basic level of protection can't be hard to do.
:)
On my iBooks, I have a firewall configured the old-fashioned way - using pico
A better thing would of course be to get the GUI to be kind to custom-written configuration files, but this could be quite hard to do.
iqu
I'm still maintaining my line that a lot of Linux is catchup, certainly in the GUI arena, but your latest post has given me at the very least pause for thought and made me think why I love open source/UNIX so much.
:)
I suppose the place where the real innovation is is in these little "intellectual challenges," as you put it. Linux's out-of-the-box hardware support is unrivalled (Windows XP can't begin to match it), and for me, the best thing about the open source UNIXes (and in this I include Mac OS X) is the "little" things that you can do with it. Would anyone like to explain to me how I could tunnel PPP over SSH on Windows? (I only mention this one, because I do it on a regular basis between Japan and the UK, and it uses all those clever UNIX things like, well, SSH, TTYs, a PPP daemon whose output is easily redirected, etc.)
Darl McBride types might ask what the point is. McBride would doubtless be asking how he could "monetize" [sic] your temperature sensors or a kernel-level driver for games consoles' controllers. Of course, truth is you can't put a monetary value on it, but it's wonderful all the same.
And is this innovation? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps it's just building on the immensely flexible and simple nature of the UNIX(-like) base that these operating systems adopt and some of the stuff is not particularly groundbreaking, but it is useful to a few of us. It's never going to help make FOSS mainstream, mostly because it's not really marketable, but is one of its greatest strengths.
iqu
Your first paragraph entirely misses the point of my post. And at no point did I suggest that Microsoft didn't copy their whole UI from, well, whoever (anyway, it is irrelevant). And in response to...
...I would first offer...
... there is some great work being done. Why do we keep settling for good enough?"
:s
"As a competative company you should be looking at what your rivals are doing and then providing them for your customers."
"Aside from the feuding and pettiness that detracts from the quality of some projects
A truly competitive company innovates - the only reason Apple are still extant in these days of Microsoft hegemony is because they innovate like fuck. If OSS was similarly innovative, it would enjoy wider usage already. What is the point of moving to a lookalike that cannot run your applications? (Linux, of course, has other real, geniune strengths, but the UI side is not one of them).
And nor was I arguing with the actual content of the Slashdot story - more hardware support for Linux is great - but rather seconding the parent thread, which in my view correctly opines the frustrating state of current OSS software development - neatly summed up as copy rather than create.
iqu
But like you say, there is always the lingering hope that it will get better. One is content with what one has when one is running Linux because, well, it's not Microsoft and some stuff (e.g. GNOME 2.6) is really rather beautiful. But, as I have pointed out before and as you rightly say here, there's very little innovation - GNOME 2.6's much-needed replacement for the file dialogue boxes are straight from Apple and the spatial file browser is another old Apple trick. And of course the Start button (you can write whatever you like on it; it's always gonna be a Start button) is hardly an open source original.
I suppose the root of the problem is that most open source development is done by nerds, whose C or asm prowess is indubitable but whose understanding of the average user is minimal to non-existent. I am not wishing to berate these types, because the work they do is often superb, but I think we can easily conclude that:
- Nerds cannot think like users and expect that every user should either work hard to understand the system or quite simply fuck off and not use their software;
- Users' expectations are far too high from a bunch of tech-types who have no understanding of users' needs.
We keep talking about Linux on the desktop. GNOME is now ready for the desktop, but what does that actually mean? OK, so now Linux is as usable as Windows, but somebody whit here the other day, Windows is not exactly good enough for most users. Why else would it need such a big tech support team in every organisation?Aside from the feuding and pettiness that detracts from the quality of some projects (I cite xMule vs. aMule and mplayer as current or past examples), there is some great work being done. Why do we keep settling for good enough?
iqu
As we've seen recently in Intel vs. China regarding China's own wireless standard (labelled GB15629.11-2003 for those interested), we can probably at least count on China to get hissy about this.
:?
Simply put, whether the threat they perceive is real or not, there is no way they are going to allow American proprietary rubbish (with evil spyware code to boot) to penetrate the Peoples' Republic. So if we have to start importing all our parts from the commies, then so be it, but even if dumbass consumers in the West buy this kinda rubbish (and, as others have said, they undoubtedly will), it simply will not fly politically elsewhere.
The push for Linux in Asia is clear - HP are going to ship Linux boxen, China has variously shown its keenness towards the open OS, NTT DoCoMo are putting Linux in phones and so on - this kind of stuff really does matter. At the very least, American hardware manufacturers are going to consider the bigger picture before alienating large numbers of potential consumers.
Microsoft is not invincible. It has failed in the mobile phone market, failed to crush Java (now, of course, flourishing on mobiles) and has a long time to examine consumers' reactions before Longhorn comes out. I really don't think it will try to push this too hard...
iqu
This is rather OT, but it further ruins your three strikes theory, so...
:)
Windows 3.x was not the first successful Windows - don't forget that it was not much more than an elaborate DOS shell with an API (as were Windows 9x/ME that followed) and that there were real alternatives back then - I cite OS/2 (which failed because IBM had no clue how to market to the consumer) and, of course, the Macintosh, whose GUI then was more refined and whose games were often graphically superior to their PC counterparts (the one I always think of is Prince of Persia, which run in glorious 640x480 on the Mac, as opposed to 320x240 on the PC).
Windows 95 is what did it for Microsoft, as it coincided rather nicely with the takeoff of the multimedia desktop PC. It rather killed the Mac, because it had decent multi-tasking, and it wasn't until about 1997-8, when PC hardware went through a really bad phase, that things started to get seriously unreliable and geeks started looking elsewhere...
iqu
Really?
:D
Wow. Cool.
Still, I will maintain the point that the average user doesn't even know what the command line is - forget a three word command, because you've lost him already.
Anyway, I like Debian more now.
iqu