You are all missing the big picture. Many of us have been predicting it and now you are seeing it come to life: insane US "intellectual property" laws, a patent system run amouck, and copyright laws completely written - and now enforced - by corporations, are going to destroy this country's place in the world.
Corporations don't care about geological artifacts; corporations don't care about people aside from their ability to generate revenue. We've already seen (in proverbial spades) how willing and able corporations can move from place to place. In their path they exploit every resource they can find until it is utterly exhausted; when US borne technology is no longer cost effective the world's corporations will not hesitate to use those derived elsewhere.
In short, life will go on - it always does. But in the process the US is quickly losing it's lead in the technology marketplace.
Can't really say I care. In fact, I'm kinda laughing because americans in general seem to be so incredibly fucking stupid and apathetic on these matters they're getting exactly what they deserve. But it is surely happening - from linux to AVS streaming video to "zigbee" wireless, the west is about to vividly realize what it means when you pass laws that encourage job migration to other nations WHILE passing laws that, at the same time, make your technology more expensive than any other. You might as well just raise taxes now and get that final nail driven while there's still someone here to dig the grave.
Whether or not I "remember" what platforms ran what programs has nothing at all to do with the focus of this article. I don't need a copy of Lotus 123 to know what platofrms it ran on - in fact, many programs ran on several platforms so having any given copy would tell me essentially nothing about "platforms."
There are plenty of historical documents about this industry and various programs, and much of those works are either public domain (websites), mainstream published (archive in LOC and libraries all over the world), and even published under GPL and "founder's copyright." There's all sorts of documentation about what did what - and even if there weren't, having an executable of any given program doesn't tell me much at all about the source. In fact, it's likely to tell me more about the state of compilers and operating systems of the day than it is to tell me about the source code.
If the argument is for source code (as it begins) then the DMCA never enters the picture, because the source code is neither "copy protected" nor encrypted. If the argument is for keeping around copies of twenty year old programs, fine - but the article fails utterly in proving the merit in this practice. Basically, it's just another poorly constructed piece of anti-law propoganda.
Sometimes it's better to say nothing at all.. unfortunately, this article uses a great many words to do just that.
it seems to me a much more meaningful "vote against your survival" is the inability of your servers to deliver the article when I clicked there for it.
Another red herring from salon?
on
Software Archaeology
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· Score: 4, Insightful
In one part of the article they mention losing "structure" of programs and talk about source code, then they talk about "losing" old code like the original DOS - for which, so far as I know, there is no publically available archive of source code. So too of Lotus 123, another piece of code mentioned in the article.
this is just more fatalistic nonsense people spew when criticising the DMCA. Yeah, it's a bad law, but this nonsense about "losing old works" is just that.
If you have the source code for something then you have no cause to fear the DMCA, since you don't need to decrypt it. And if you don't have the source code, where is the value? Is there really any value in running lotus 123 for the Apple//? Perhaps if you have an Apple//, but so what? You cannot "fly over the code" from any height (as was mentioned in the article) because you don't have any code to fly over. You have an executable, and the "structure" there is quite different than looking at source code.
If you want source code for DOS, hit freedos.org and download it. It's not Microsoft's source, but so what? It does the very same job and, in many cases, it's superior to the original. Works that have value will be replicated and emulated; works thta have no value simply have no value - where is the need (or logic) in "preserving" them?
I'd like to agree with you - except Britain and Canada both, in spite of their leadrers being called on the carpet on a regular basis, still manage to pass just as many stupid laws as the US. In fact, of all the places I can think where I might want to live besides the US, Canada and Britain occupy places on that list somewhere just above Singapore and mainland china. Hell, even Cuba sounds better - at least the weather is nicer, and it's corrupt enough for someone with US dollars to enjoy a fairly good life.
The US has problems, and the brits who have been making the US talk show tour make good points about debate and accountability - but I don't see any evidence at all it works any better over there than here. Tony Blair actually has to deal with people getting in his face where shrub can avoid any public questions about accountability, but in the end it's Britain - not the US - that has street corner cameras and laws requiring ISPs to record every move their customers make online. Is that really any better than being ruled by corporate sponsored politicians? The only difference I see between the two systems is who gets to control your dossier...
NRA members are almost zealous in their financial support.
If those "file traders" would just leave behind the music of the corporations that sue them we wouldn't need a lobby - the problem would take care of itself because the publishers wouldn't find enough profit in the music industry to justify sustaining an RIAA. The problem is "file traders" - like the MP3.COM of yore - don't necessarily believe in that stuff about empowering the artist or in helping build a new model of distribution that would help the creators while bypassing the suits. They generally don't care about anything but free music. And if you're paying a lobbyist to defend your (narrow and shortsighted) interest, it ain't free any more.
I don't get it - how are either of these conservative? We have yet to see how Hillary the latter will rule (although indications are he'll be as radically corporatist as Rosen), but Hillary the former was quite obviously a radical liberal. The only difference between Rosen and Al Sharpton is the group to which they would like to give special priviledges.
Don't forget Frist is from TN, the center of the country music industry - probably the closest you can get to Hollywood without actually going to Hollywood. And he has plenty of pull of his own.
I'm rather sick of these radical modern day liberals (as opposed to old school liberals, who actually believed in liberty) being called "conservatives." These modern day robber barrons are not conservators of anything except greed. I have in mind a much appropriate word to describe them...
of why the industry is bad for music. Here's a very fine artist who signed to a label and then STOPPED PRODUCING - for more than a year while her label released every single track from her CD as a single/music video/marketing opportunity. This is an increasingly common trend in the business - produce every track as a single to get the CD back on the charts again and again - and in jewel's case it had the effect of making a talented and refreshing act into a burned out laughing stock. (Remember the SNL skit about the college kid trapped in a mountain cabin with jewel? Going homicidal after listening to her sing the same ten songs a thousand times?)
Same thing happened with Sarah McLachlan (God only knows what her new album will sound like). Same thing (again) with Alisha Keyes. It's almost better if an artist is a talentless hack because that's the only way now to be spared chronic overexposure.
Just about everyone I know has at least one yahoo or hotmail account. Right there is your email - persistent and reasonably well backed up. Edit documents, photos - even MP3 files can all be done with this box. You want to store it? Stick it on a network drive, either on your LAN or at your ISP. Play games? That's in there too. All that missing is permanent user storage - and NONE of those activities mandate local, persistent user storage.
Tiger Direct even "suggests" a $39.95 128MB keychain storage dongle. That's a decent amount of storage to carry in your pocket or, if you don't need portability, spend the same 40 bucks on a 40gb refurb hard drive.
Very early in lindows launch they made this quite clear. They offered the lindows "developer kit" for some ridiculously low price (I think it was $99) and, after signing a licensing agreement you could develop and market your own co-branded lindows distro.
Back then most people laughed. And described like that it still sounds laughable, doesn't it? Why would you pay money for an SDK and then sign a license for X$/install to sell a linux distro when you can put one together, based on debian (as lindows is) or redhat, for free?
Well, now look: lindows has a reasonable amount of brand recognition and press. You can put together a distro of redhat and try to get your compu-idiot clients to use it, or you can offer the same thing with a distro that is being sold at wal-mart and gets favorable press in all sorts of consumer press. Which do you think offers the better marketing opportunity when it comes to the technically challenged?
The main reason I'm even curious about lindows is because it looks, on the surface at least, like they've put together a reasonably coherent, usable linux distro that DOESN'T install 10 gigs of sydn (shit you don't need). Even my windows box now has two web browsers because I use mozilla; is this a "feature?" No, it's a nuisance because inevitably you end up with some piece of software that relies on using browserx for something when you want it to use browsery.
Joe gear and Jill SewingCircle don't need "a few" web browsers any more than they need a multitude of speedometers on their new car. They don't need "a few" chat programs, or "a few" mail programs - they need ONE that works, reliably and in a sane and familiar manner.
You can get a barebones PC with an OS for the same price you'd pay most places for a barebones PC?
Actually, "that ain't not bad." I'd like to try lindows but I'm not gonna pay even $50 for it without knowing what I'm getting. But if I can get a barebones PC thrown in with the deal, it don't seem like much of a risk at all. Hell, stick an old 40GB drive in the box, sell it, and make a profit on the deal...
Easynews has retention of at least several weeks - even in the binaries groups. the discussion groups go back considerably longer.
news.cis.dfn.de (I believe that's it - you can find it mentioned a lot in the "free news servers" newsgroup) has retention in the discussion groups (at least the ones I've looked in) all the way back to (at least) december of last year.
But if you need years of research data, it seems google would be the place to go. If your needs are limited to only a few groups, many of them have archives. The archives, for example, for some of the rec.audio groups go back many, many years and are fully indexed and stored in digests.
I also don't get the complaining about terms. These people have a huge archive of usenet data; there's nothing to stop you from building one of your own except the fact it would cost a damn fortune to get setup and organized. If you have that kinda money, quit complaining and do it; if you don't, quit complaining about someone else (who does) taking the initiative. It would seem google has the only reasonably complete usenet archive - would you rather there were none at all?
And you know this is EXACTLY why the automakers hyped them in the first place. There's a lot more profit in these big vehicles and it's very easy to play off people's fears once these monsters are alll over the highways.
The automakers bought the government long ago, and the two have fostered a conspiracy of destruction upon it's own people... all in the name of profit.
Personal vehicles over 3000lbs should be taxed to fucking death. And so should gasoline.
If your goal is to foster a standard and then make money off licensing, how da fuck you gonna do it without a patent?
Understand unique doesn't have to mean "no one else did it." All it has to mean is "THIS is how WE did it and you can't do it OUR way without paying us." This is how MPEGLA can make people pay for using MPEG - even 'tho there's a thousand similar ways to do it, most of them don't interoperate without making use of that IP.
If your goal is to protect an invention, patents can do it. But they can also protect a standard. It's called a design patent - and that's what this is about.
The geek factor is the prime reason so much great open source software lacks the pentration to usurp proprietary, sometimes patented widgets like this one.
I use PGP for just about everything (I have a built in "roaming profile" via PGPdisk) but I don't believe it compresses stuff (if it does you sure can't tell it - a 600MB PGPdisk won't hold more than 550MB before it gets so fragged you can hardly use the CD). You can use NTFS and compression, but that's not nearly as efficient as zip and you can't mount ntfs partitions in read only mode from win2k, so NTFS parts on CD are essentially useless. It's easy enough to install, but then you gotta be comfortable with formatting and all that stuff - where does this leave people who think "explorer" is just "how you get the internet?"
The problem with pgpdisk is it's not pervasive and there doesn't seem to be a well supported fork out from under the thumb of NA. It would be fantastic if there were a lightweight pgpdisk runtime (ie not a 15MB download, with a braindead consumer oriented GUI) available that was supported in the oss community, but I don't know of one.... do you?
I have two win2000 boxes here that run 24/7 on a rural electrical grid and the only time they require reboot is when we have a brownout or I change some hardware.
The last two days I've been visiting a friend who has a Hewlett Packard tower system she bought brand spanking new from Sam's club and, according to her, has been trouble since day one. At first I thought it was typical ME shittiness and began to install win2k, but now I suspect it's either a bad drive or bad motherboard. And it's been having system lock/reboot problems since she brought it home! And in spite of this flakiness she didn't replace it because she doesn't know that much about them and her husband (who knows nothing at all) would love nothing more than to see the damn thing in the scrapheap and NO computers in the house.
Now, not everyone has a controlling husband, but there are LOTS of people out there with absolute shit machines bought from places like Wallyworld and Sam's and even Sears and Radio Shack - machines made from the cheapest, most proprietary pieces the far east manufacturers can cobble together - and so people have come to EXPECT computers to work like this. They don't fix them because everyone they know who they think knows something about computers just says "winblowz suxorz" and so the software gets the blame for shitty, lowest bid hardware that would perform just as poorly running linux, BSD, or any other OS.
Just watch: if those cheap shit wal-mart peecees sell any numbers at all it won't be long at all until linux begins to get the same bad rap as windows...
The "wild west" aspect has long been the source of attraction for me. And not just Russia, but all those former members of the federation. Definitely dangerous, but rife with promise as well.
Just like that other "wild west" once was - before it was planted with the neon of corporations.
Coincidentally, I just finished a commentary on that very topic.
How common are linux firewire drivers? Do you know of all the encryption possibilities written into the spec? Do you know of the industry agreements on how 1394 is applied? What happens when all hardware uses firewire drives and all drives are encrypted and no hardware makers will supply documentation on their interface chips nor provide linux drivers because they're "security holes?"
Firewire isn't popular outside consumer gear (and not really that much even there) in part because those who understand it don't trust it, and those who don't understand it don't see a need for it.
Until this nonsense with hardware makers locking up specs on commodity chips because they fear regulatory reprisals, I (and, I suspect most) will happily embrace incremental upgrades to legacy standards that don't provide yet more opportunities for the parasites in the valley to dictate how we may use our own machines.
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It seems pretty obvious that "to the finder goes the spoils." If you bought the camera and are too stupid to use the rebate, that's your own problem.
Like I said: you stupid fuckers deserve every single lost job you create.
You are all missing the big picture. Many of us have been predicting it and now you are seeing it come to life: insane US "intellectual property" laws, a patent system run amouck, and copyright laws completely written - and now enforced - by corporations, are going to destroy this country's place in the world.
Corporations don't care about geological artifacts; corporations don't care about people aside from their ability to generate revenue. We've already seen (in proverbial spades) how willing and able corporations can move from place to place. In their path they exploit every resource they can find until it is utterly exhausted; when US borne technology is no longer cost effective the world's corporations will not hesitate to use those derived elsewhere.
In short, life will go on - it always does. But in the process the US is quickly losing it's lead in the technology marketplace.
Can't really say I care. In fact, I'm kinda laughing because americans in general seem to be so incredibly fucking stupid and apathetic on these matters they're getting exactly what they deserve. But it is surely happening - from linux to AVS streaming video to "zigbee" wireless, the west is about to vividly realize what it means when you pass laws that encourage job migration to other nations WHILE passing laws that, at the same time, make your technology more expensive than any other. You might as well just raise taxes now and get that final nail driven while there's still someone here to dig the grave.
There are plenty of historical documents about this industry and various programs, and much of those works are either public domain (websites), mainstream published (archive in LOC and libraries all over the world), and even published under GPL and "founder's copyright." There's all sorts of documentation about what did what - and even if there weren't, having an executable of any given program doesn't tell me much at all about the source. In fact, it's likely to tell me more about the state of compilers and operating systems of the day than it is to tell me about the source code.
If the argument is for source code (as it begins) then the DMCA never enters the picture, because the source code is neither "copy protected" nor encrypted. If the argument is for keeping around copies of twenty year old programs, fine - but the article fails utterly in proving the merit in this practice. Basically, it's just another poorly constructed piece of anti-law propoganda.
Sometimes it's better to say nothing at all.. unfortunately, this article uses a great many words to do just that.
it seems to me a much more meaningful "vote against your survival" is the inability of your servers to deliver the article when I clicked there for it.
If you have the source code for something then you have no cause to fear the DMCA, since you don't need to decrypt it. And if you don't have the source code, where is the value? Is there really any value in running lotus 123 for the Apple//? Perhaps if you have an Apple//, but so what? You cannot "fly over the code" from any height (as was mentioned in the article) because you don't have any code to fly over. You have an executable, and the "structure" there is quite different than looking at source code.
If you want source code for DOS, hit freedos.org and download it. It's not Microsoft's source, but so what? It does the very same job and, in many cases, it's superior to the original. Works that have value will be replicated and emulated; works thta have no value simply have no value - where is the need (or logic) in "preserving" them?
The US has problems, and the brits who have been making the US talk show tour make good points about debate and accountability - but I don't see any evidence at all it works any better over there than here. Tony Blair actually has to deal with people getting in his face where shrub can avoid any public questions about accountability, but in the end it's Britain - not the US - that has street corner cameras and laws requiring ISPs to record every move their customers make online. Is that really any better than being ruled by corporate sponsored politicians? The only difference I see between the two systems is who gets to control your dossier...
Ummm... wrong.
I think this is really the only theory anyone has put forth that actually makes sense.
google is your friend
If those "file traders" would just leave behind the music of the corporations that sue them we wouldn't need a lobby - the problem would take care of itself because the publishers wouldn't find enough profit in the music industry to justify sustaining an RIAA. The problem is "file traders" - like the MP3.COM of yore - don't necessarily believe in that stuff about empowering the artist or in helping build a new model of distribution that would help the creators while bypassing the suits. They generally don't care about anything but free music. And if you're paying a lobbyist to defend your (narrow and shortsighted) interest, it ain't free any more.
Don't forget Frist is from TN, the center of the country music industry - probably the closest you can get to Hollywood without actually going to Hollywood. And he has plenty of pull of his own.
I'm rather sick of these radical modern day liberals (as opposed to old school liberals, who actually believed in liberty) being called "conservatives." These modern day robber barrons are not conservators of anything except greed. I have in mind a much appropriate word to describe them...
Same thing happened with Sarah McLachlan (God only knows what her new album will sound like). Same thing (again) with Alisha Keyes. It's almost better if an artist is a talentless hack because that's the only way now to be spared chronic overexposure.
Tiger Direct even "suggests" a $39.95 128MB keychain storage dongle. That's a decent amount of storage to carry in your pocket or, if you don't need portability, spend the same 40 bucks on a 40gb refurb hard drive.
Back then most people laughed. And described like that it still sounds laughable, doesn't it? Why would you pay money for an SDK and then sign a license for X$/install to sell a linux distro when you can put one together, based on debian (as lindows is) or redhat, for free?
Well, now look: lindows has a reasonable amount of brand recognition and press. You can put together a distro of redhat and try to get your compu-idiot clients to use it, or you can offer the same thing with a distro that is being sold at wal-mart and gets favorable press in all sorts of consumer press. Which do you think offers the better marketing opportunity when it comes to the technically challenged?
And, unlike the iopener, this thing even has a NIC. Imagine that! A fast network connection in an "internet appliance!"
Joe gear and Jill SewingCircle don't need "a few" web browsers any more than they need a multitude of speedometers on their new car. They don't need "a few" chat programs, or "a few" mail programs - they need ONE that works, reliably and in a sane and familiar manner.
Actually, "that ain't not bad." I'd like to try lindows but I'm not gonna pay even $50 for it without knowing what I'm getting. But if I can get a barebones PC thrown in with the deal, it don't seem like much of a risk at all. Hell, stick an old 40GB drive in the box, sell it, and make a profit on the deal...
news.cis.dfn.de (I believe that's it - you can find it mentioned a lot in the "free news servers" newsgroup) has retention in the discussion groups (at least the ones I've looked in) all the way back to (at least) december of last year.
But if you need years of research data, it seems google would be the place to go. If your needs are limited to only a few groups, many of them have archives. The archives, for example, for some of the rec.audio groups go back many, many years and are fully indexed and stored in digests.
I also don't get the complaining about terms. These people have a huge archive of usenet data; there's nothing to stop you from building one of your own except the fact it would cost a damn fortune to get setup and organized. If you have that kinda money, quit complaining and do it; if you don't, quit complaining about someone else (who does) taking the initiative. It would seem google has the only reasonably complete usenet archive - would you rather there were none at all?
The automakers bought the government long ago, and the two have fostered a conspiracy of destruction upon it's own people... all in the name of profit.
Personal vehicles over 3000lbs should be taxed to fucking death. And so should gasoline.
Understand unique doesn't have to mean "no one else did it." All it has to mean is "THIS is how WE did it and you can't do it OUR way without paying us." This is how MPEGLA can make people pay for using MPEG - even 'tho there's a thousand similar ways to do it, most of them don't interoperate without making use of that IP.
If your goal is to protect an invention, patents can do it. But they can also protect a standard. It's called a design patent - and that's what this is about.
I use PGP for just about everything (I have a built in "roaming profile" via PGPdisk) but I don't believe it compresses stuff (if it does you sure can't tell it - a 600MB PGPdisk won't hold more than 550MB before it gets so fragged you can hardly use the CD). You can use NTFS and compression, but that's not nearly as efficient as zip and you can't mount ntfs partitions in read only mode from win2k, so NTFS parts on CD are essentially useless. It's easy enough to install, but then you gotta be comfortable with formatting and all that stuff - where does this leave people who think "explorer" is just "how you get the internet?"
The problem with pgpdisk is it's not pervasive and there doesn't seem to be a well supported fork out from under the thumb of NA. It would be fantastic if there were a lightweight pgpdisk runtime (ie not a 15MB download, with a braindead consumer oriented GUI) available that was supported in the oss community, but I don't know of one.... do you?
The last two days I've been visiting a friend who has a Hewlett Packard tower system she bought brand spanking new from Sam's club and, according to her, has been trouble since day one. At first I thought it was typical ME shittiness and began to install win2k, but now I suspect it's either a bad drive or bad motherboard. And it's been having system lock/reboot problems since she brought it home! And in spite of this flakiness she didn't replace it because she doesn't know that much about them and her husband (who knows nothing at all) would love nothing more than to see the damn thing in the scrapheap and NO computers in the house.
Now, not everyone has a controlling husband, but there are LOTS of people out there with absolute shit machines bought from places like Wallyworld and Sam's and even Sears and Radio Shack - machines made from the cheapest, most proprietary pieces the far east manufacturers can cobble together - and so people have come to EXPECT computers to work like this. They don't fix them because everyone they know who they think knows something about computers just says "winblowz suxorz" and so the software gets the blame for shitty, lowest bid hardware that would perform just as poorly running linux, BSD, or any other OS.
Just watch: if those cheap shit wal-mart peecees sell any numbers at all it won't be long at all until linux begins to get the same bad rap as windows...
we already ate the horse - and we don't HAVE bats, you insensitive clod!
Now that is ironic...
Just like that other "wild west" once was - before it was planted with the neon of corporations.
Coincidentally, I just finished a commentary on that very topic.
(Notice I didn't say "ironic?")
Firewire isn't popular outside consumer gear (and not really that much even there) in part because those who understand it don't trust it, and those who don't understand it don't see a need for it.
Until this nonsense with hardware makers locking up specs on commodity chips because they fear regulatory reprisals, I (and, I suspect most) will happily embrace incremental upgrades to legacy standards that don't provide yet more opportunities for the parasites in the valley to dictate how we may use our own machines.