I'm not convinced skepticism is on the decline. Humanity has a long and gullible history. There have always been some skeptics, but most of the population has always believed what they were told.
The goal of the Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, and Richard Stallman, are not to have a strong enforcable GPL, they're to be free to use, screw around with, and redistribute software. The GPL is a means to that end, a way to use current copyright law to enable them/us to do that with some software.
The GPL's goals being achieved pretty much universally would make it obsolete, yes.
As for patents, those already exist, and are already a problem. The GPL is pretty toothless in terms of patents (operating, as it does, in copyright space). Patents simply could not begin to replace copyrights for software - the restrictions on them (duration, originality, non-obviousness, cost) are too strict for them to be as ubiquitous a protection as copyright currently is.
There was an online music store for AOL members, MusicNet.
Switching over to NSV is expensive because you have to have a toolchain that's as mature and easy to use as real's, and you have to get that in place in the 60 places in AOL where they encode video. Only after you do that, and then transcode all your existing content can you realize the main benefit of that - not paying real for each copy of AOL you ship. It's not undoable, but it's not easy neither.
3 years ago they WERE working on their ITMs, and they just got to beta, is what the title article is about.
The last beta was realased over six months ago. I guess they could at this point say "2.0" at any day, but I don't see it improving much over the beta, which is only minimally different from the alphas.
AOL already has big licensing agreements with the other major labels as part of the MusicNet deal. If they can give Sony over $0.60 of every $0.99 they take (nevermind surcharges, development costs, etc), why would Sony turn that down?
95% of the media player is the UI and control logic. If the UI is portable, and the playback engine is even a little bit encapsulated (in this case it's totally encapsulated in the "Unagi" control (an A/X version of Winamp's playback engine), it should be extremely easy to port.
But come on, AOL isn't going to port the AOL media player to Linux. Who the fuck would use it if they did?
MacOS, however, might be worth their while; they'd just have to write a wrapper to swap out Unagi for QuickTime and they'd be all set. I have worked with both Unagi and QuickTime, on the AOL Media Player (though a few rewrites ago. Also, I now work for a company that is good, instead of one that is bad), so I have pretty good sense of what would be involved.
hah! I worked on Sonique 2, before working for AOL on the media player.
Lycos lost the entire Sonique staff in mid 2001 through layoffs and subsequent quitting. At this point Sonique 2 was about 6 megs of nearly completely undocumented very complex code, with a number of subtle bugs and gotchas. So it's not a big surprise that when they hired a new guy or two to work on it a few months later he wasn't really able to make it ship-worthy on short order.
The original source of Sonique 2's problem though, is that it was 100% engineering driven. We never had any schedules or deadlines, so instead of hunkering down to get something to release quality, we ended up fooling ourself into thinking that advanced features were more important. As a result the alphas support loading skins from PSD files and support most of Photoshop's blend modes in realtime!
It was a tremendously fun place to work, since we mostly worked on the cool parts, but ultimately a little disillusioning.
I believe the main reason Lycos hasn't just axed Sonique entirely is they paid $80M for it and if they stop development entirely they have to admit that that money is a 100% loss. Certainly there's not a lot of incentive to vie for the title of best free media player.
In order to make Winamp what AOL wants (essentially a front end to pimp their online music store) they would have to turn it into something that ALL of their existing user base would hate.
Several of the 'rewrite after rewrite' actually were little more than branches of the latest Winamp - which was Winamp3 which is one reason why they got tossed and rewritten.
Winamp3 wasn't marketing driven at all. The problems with it are mostly the fault of an overambitious and poorly directed engineering team. Not that I think AOL would have directed them in a positive direction, but they definitely took a very hands-off approach to winamp.
The value of Nullsoft to them is in the multimedia A/X controls and server components which AOL has integrated into their client, and which they use for the playback core in the AOL Media Player.
I used to work for AOL on this product from 2002-2003*. I personally worked on 4 completely different implementations which all got scrapped for one reason or another (usual reason: internal politics). I laughed out loud when I saw 14 months of pain being condensed into a single sentence in this article.
The AOL Media Player is targeted at their mainstream user base. Winamp is targeted at the technically savvy people. The Winamp user base typically is extremely sensitive to advertising and corporatism. Not trying to win over the winamp users to the AOL Media Player is a very good decision.
Honesty, that's the biggest incentive for me to work long hours. If I'm only in the office while everyone else is I have a lot of distractions. But when I'm here alone, when there are no meetings scheduled, then if I get going, nothing stops me. On the other hand, if I do get distracted there's noöne there to bring me back on track. If I'm in the office at 2:00am, it's either because I'm getting tons done, or nothing done, never somewhere in between.
That actually does mean that all N64 games are exactly as fun as all PS2 games. Any reviews that tell you otherwise don't understand the underlying technology.
Anything that is evolved which we do not recognize as beneficial can be chocked up to our inability to realize what's REALLY good for an organism in the long run. Any counter-example of a destructive genetic trait (tendency towards alcoholism, depression) can be written off as 'oh, there's a benefit, we just don't understand it'.
Seriously, this is basically the same as one of the weaker arguments some religious folks use to defend against the "Problem Of Evil" (how can evil exist if there's an omnipotent benevolent god).
How about this: Humanity's tendency to muck around with crap we don't understand! Is that ultimately beneficial? Is it something which was not created evolutionarily? Is it not beneficial?
The advantage to me as a buyer is I can buy from people who don't transact enough to make CC processing economical. In certain markets (ie, eBay) the question is not "what is the advantage of PayPal over using credit cards" but "What is the advantage of PayPal over sending a personal check". Then the advantage is: Convenience and speed.
The reviews I've read said in fact that the pictures are less vibrant (worse color) but more crisp (higher effective resolution) than higher resolution cameras.
If you don't really want it, or can't afford it, that doesn't justify copyright infringement.
Why not?
I'm serious. They're not making money out of it whether you pirate it or not. Who is harmed by you listening to the music? Or is only immoral by some puritanical "you shouldn't get something without working for it" ethic?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it does contain much that is apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate.
It's like they say. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your kid brother.
If you have a 1 in 50k chance of dying in a commercial flight, over just 13 flights, you accrue a greater than 1 in 4023 chance of death.
Either one of these statistics is wrong, or the average person flys less than 13 times in their life. That seems low.
Scepticism is a vanishing but valuable trait
I'm not convinced skepticism is on the decline. Humanity has a long and gullible history. There have always been some skeptics, but most of the population has always believed what they were told.
Have you actually tried removing notepad?
Windows tries pretty hard to keep you from doing so.
Essentially you want your startup scripts to be a makefile..
The goal of the Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, and Richard Stallman, are not to have a strong enforcable GPL, they're to be free to use, screw around with, and redistribute software. The GPL is a means to that end, a way to use current copyright law to enable them/us to do that with some software.
The GPL's goals being achieved pretty much universally would make it obsolete, yes.
As for patents, those already exist, and are already a problem. The GPL is pretty toothless in terms of patents (operating, as it does, in copyright space). Patents simply could not begin to replace copyrights for software - the restrictions on them (duration, originality, non-obviousness, cost) are too strict for them to be as ubiquitous a protection as copyright currently is.
There was an online music store for AOL members, MusicNet.
Switching over to NSV is expensive because you have to have a toolchain that's as mature and easy to use as real's, and you have to get that in place in the 60 places in AOL where they encode video. Only after you do that, and then transcode all your existing content can you realize the main benefit of that - not paying real for each copy of AOL you ship. It's not undoable, but it's not easy neither.
3 years ago they WERE working on their ITMs, and they just got to beta, is what the title article is about.
The last beta was realased over six months ago. I guess they could at this point say "2.0" at any day, but I don't see it improving much over the beta, which is only minimally different from the alphas.
Counterexamples: Shoutcast. GNUtella. W.A.S.T.E
AOL already has big licensing agreements with the other major labels as part of the MusicNet deal. If they can give Sony over $0.60 of every $0.99 they take (nevermind surcharges, development costs, etc), why would Sony turn that down?
95% of the media player is the UI and control logic. If the UI is portable, and the playback engine is even a little bit encapsulated (in this case it's totally encapsulated in the "Unagi" control (an A/X version of Winamp's playback engine), it should be extremely easy to port.
But come on, AOL isn't going to port the AOL media player to Linux. Who the fuck would use it if they did?
MacOS, however, might be worth their while; they'd just have to write a wrapper to swap out Unagi for QuickTime and they'd be all set. I have worked with both Unagi and QuickTime, on the AOL Media Player (though a few rewrites ago. Also, I now work for a company that is good, instead of one that is bad), so I have pretty good sense of what would be involved.
hah! I worked on Sonique 2, before working for AOL on the media player.
Lycos lost the entire Sonique staff in mid 2001 through layoffs and subsequent quitting. At this point Sonique 2 was about 6 megs of nearly completely undocumented very complex code, with a number of subtle bugs and gotchas. So it's not a big surprise that when they hired a new guy or two to work on it a few months later he wasn't really able to make it ship-worthy on short order.
The original source of Sonique 2's problem though, is that it was 100% engineering driven. We never had any schedules or deadlines, so instead of hunkering down to get something to release quality, we ended up fooling ourself into thinking that advanced features were more important. As a result the alphas support loading skins from PSD files and support most of Photoshop's blend modes in realtime!
It was a tremendously fun place to work, since we mostly worked on the cool parts, but ultimately a little disillusioning.
I believe the main reason Lycos hasn't just axed Sonique entirely is they paid $80M for it and if they stop development entirely they have to admit that that money is a 100% loss. Certainly there's not a lot of incentive to vie for the title of best free media player.
In order to make Winamp what AOL wants (essentially a front end to pimp their online music store) they would have to turn it into something that ALL of their existing user base would hate.
Several of the 'rewrite after rewrite' actually were little more than branches of the latest Winamp - which was Winamp3 which is one reason why they got tossed and rewritten.
Winamp3 wasn't marketing driven at all. The problems with it are mostly the fault of an overambitious and poorly directed engineering team. Not that I think AOL would have directed them in a positive direction, but they definitely took a very hands-off approach to winamp.
The value of Nullsoft to them is in the multimedia A/X controls and server components which AOL has integrated into their client, and which they use for the playback core in the AOL Media Player.
I used to work for AOL on this product from 2002-2003*. I personally worked on 4 completely different implementations which all got scrapped for one reason or another (usual reason: internal politics). I laughed out loud when I saw 14 months of pain being condensed into a single sentence in this article.
The AOL Media Player is targeted at their mainstream user base. Winamp is targeted at the technically savvy people. The Winamp user base typically is extremely sensitive to advertising and corporatism. Not trying to win over the winamp users to the AOL Media Player is a very good decision.
* worst job ever
Honesty, that's the biggest incentive for me to work long hours. If I'm only in the office while everyone else is I have a lot of distractions. But when I'm here alone, when there are no meetings scheduled, then if I get going, nothing stops me. On the other hand, if I do get distracted there's noöne there to bring me back on track. If I'm in the office at 2:00am, it's either because I'm getting tons done, or nothing done, never somewhere in between.
100 dvds on one disc? fine make three copies, and you probably have a lower chance of all three failing than you do of any one of your dvds failing.
That actually does mean that all N64 games are exactly as fun as all PS2 games. Any reviews that tell you otherwise don't understand the underlying technology.
Is this an accurate summary:
Anything that is evolved which we do not recognize as beneficial can be chocked up to our inability to realize what's REALLY good for an organism in the long run. Any counter-example of a destructive genetic trait (tendency towards alcoholism, depression) can be written off as 'oh, there's a benefit, we just don't understand it'.
Seriously, this is basically the same as one of the weaker arguments some religious folks use to defend against the "Problem Of Evil" (how can evil exist if there's an omnipotent benevolent god).
How about this: Humanity's tendency to muck around with crap we don't understand! Is that ultimately beneficial? Is it something which was not created evolutionarily? Is it not beneficial?
Evolution doesn't allow such things in they types of numbers we're experiencing.
You're trying to tell me that there's an evolutionary benefit to being nearsighted? After all look how many people are!
Evolution is pretty sloppy. It doesn't 'account for' anything, except for whether creatures die before reproducing instead of afterwards.
The advantage to me as a buyer is I can buy from people who don't transact enough to make CC processing economical. In certain markets (ie, eBay) the question is not "what is the advantage of PayPal over using credit cards" but "What is the advantage of PayPal over sending a personal check". Then the advantage is: Convenience and speed.
The reviews I've read said in fact that the pictures are less vibrant (worse color) but more crisp (higher effective resolution) than higher resolution cameras.
A finger print tied to a password on the other hand
... writing passwords on your hand I guess is a lot more secure than Post-It notes.
If you don't really want it, or can't afford it, that doesn't justify copyright infringement.
Why not?
I'm serious. They're not making money out of it whether you pirate it or not. Who is harmed by you listening to the music? Or is only immoral by some puritanical "you shouldn't get something without working for it" ethic?