Basically what they are saying is: we are between the 6 euro/month line and 0 euro/month. I don't see the business advantage here. That's nicely put, but I think they're looking at a longer game than that. They're playing for a future in which application delivery is a bulk commodity. I don't just mean space - they've already demonstrated that once you've built the data centre, space is as cheap as water - but the capacity to compute and deliver.
It's already happening, as it does in every computing medium: layers of abstraction build up to meet less expert users and more expert users create new possibilities on top of them. The kids want rails, not DBI. It's very likely that in ten years' time building your own LAMP stack equivalent will seem as sensible as as soldering together your own computer does now. There will still be people who do it, but they'll be the geniuses and the ones who live in faraday cages.
In that world, the winner is the one who determines the standard interfaces at the back and delivers the eyeballs at the front. Google is very well placed indeed.
Get off your high horse and go build your next big Web 2.0 script that can do anything as long as you have less than 100 daily visitors.
That's not really very helpful. I still feel like an expat perl programmer but I have rails/nginx sites that see over 100,000 people a day without any difficulty. They're clustered over four servers, none of which peaks at more than a half of its capacity. Five years ago I was running similarly busy sites under mod_perl and apache 1.3.x. The architecture was more powerful but less robust. I could do much all sorts of interesting things with the apache lifecycle - rails feels like lego by comparison - but the whole assembly was flaky and temperamental, each mod_perl process took up to 50MB and I lived in constant fear of the whole thing falling over.
That probably has as much to do with my code quality as anything else (and the 'interesting things') but it does show that the modern high level frameworks are a viable alternative. Rails doesn't scale well but it does cluster well, and hardware is cheap. I miss the quality of people you get in the perl community, the quality of documentation (out here they think that having a blog counts) and the cheerful absurdism. I don't miss the posturing and strop, and in terms of getting things done I'm much better off than I was.
Logic faulty. Species that are able to produce vitamin C at low cost are likely to make more liberal metabolic use of it than species that have to find and eat it. They'll use it as a general purpose reducing agent where we presumably use something else, and no doubt lots of other things that I have no idea about.
There is no reason at all why I should eat as much vitamin C as a goat would make, though I am very pleased to discover (on wikipedia) this new unit of measurement.
I'm sure your main point is correct, and that the RDA of vitamin C is lower than the optimum intake for perfect health. I imagine that's usually the case, as the RDAs were introduced in an age where the concern was to protect the health of the poor, not to optimise the fitness of the rich.
The rest of your argument is nonsense, and no amount of emboldening will make it persuasive. No human being in history has managed to eat 15g of vitamin C every day - that would be 300 oranges - but we seem to get by.
Socially responsible investing is essentially impossible.
Not impossible, just difficult, and isn't the whole point of the Gates Foundation to place money selectively in order to "reduce inequity and improve lives"? Now they're saying that putting money in the right place is a problem too hard to work out.
Public companies are almost always too large and complex to boil down into a single binary good/evil decision matrix
You're right, but the decision they've made here is much less complex than that. Nobody can objectively weigh up which is worse, BAT or BAe, but anyone can say "I'm not going to put my assets at the disposal of tobacco and arms companies". When someone like the Gates Foundation says that the pension funds and investment banks who channel all this money will take notice and offer an alternative. Instead, rather than thinking through the problem of how to do the greatest good with a huge pile of money, the Foundation has decided to seek the greatest possible return, regardless of the consequences, and do good later.
Next thing you know, people will be using torture to fight for freedom. Oh, wait.
Come on. 12" powerbook and a phone (which can also be gps and pda, if you like). What else do you need?
As for the bag, if you want to carry a load of fragile equipment in comfort and safety, ask a photojournalist. They've always had to do it, and to my mind the best equipment bag you can buy is a billingham. You could fit everything in a Hadley and not even look like a geek*, or add an SLR and some clothes and it'll still fit in a 445. Mine is over 20 years old and only just broken in.
*If that's a drawback, consider a Lowepro instead. But do you really want that 'this is where I keep my expensive laptop' look?
or rather he was very wrong then, but he'll be right one day. wifi is the key.
The only thing that could knock the ipod off its perch is a player that provides the same nearly-transparent play-you-anything service as an ipod and itunes do together, but without needing a computer to connect it to the world. The mp3 player as computer satellite is a solved problem.
I don't think it's going to happen any time soon, either. There are two factors that prevent the mp3 player from functioning as a standalone device:
1. everyone has cds that they still want to use
2. by the time you've got the size and brainpower to present an effective itunes-type interface, you might as well be a laptop.
The first obstacle will dwindle: how many teenagers buy cds now? The second is the key, the reason why microsoft keeps trying to get into the living room and why the only credible threat to the ipod comes from the phone people: because it's the connection that will matter. In five or six years time wifi will be ubiquitous, a designer who is currently in art college gold-leafing her shoes will have a brainwave and find a way to put a useable open-ended record shop on a tiny pocket device, et viola: the ipod is in the corner getting drunk with the walkman. Unless she's working for Apple.
And that, in turn, is another reason why Apple are so right to focus on tying up the content and the means of content-creation. The only way to supersede the ipod is to provide even more direct and personal experience of the media, and the way things are going now, only Apple will be in a position to do that.
Nokia and Amazon together might have a chance, I suppose, but my guess is that in a few years time Microsoft will be suffocating in a shrinking corporate-desktop niche and AppleDisney will be toe to toe with Viacom and Time-Warner (and Sony, if they manage to get PS3 out the door with decent networking).
So the question is, why are people so offended when Google censors for China, but think the same behavior is fine for Europe?
Could it be because in China they are colluding with an oppressive totalitarian regime to control the flow of information and so helping the regime to remain in power? Whereas in France and Germany they've just made a pragmatic decision to go along with some quaint local laws about what cannot be mentioned.
I agree that the cases are of the same type - and I wish they hadn't capitulated in either case - but in magnitude they're very different and that does matter. It's shoplifting and murder: they're both against the law, but people are correct to be more outraged by one than the other.
Unless they make a strong effort to publicise to the Chinese people the nature and extent of the censorship they live under - and a muttered footnote is not good enough - this is straightforward, profit-motivated evil corporate behaviour. Very disappointing.
Some tousled corporate parasite is right now celebrating his ability to generate authentic grassroots excitement in a tailored halo demographic that combines youthshare with techster credibility and so cements the brand in the minds of 20something pre-life-crisis shoppers as both a technology leader and a style marker.
What they don't realise is that this is slashdot on a saturday night and all he's getting is six year old kernel hackers and grumpy old toads like me, who are not only incapable of getting excited about yet another sucker gadget, they're also the least likely consumer role models in the world.
They can make as many xboxes as they want, and they will.
I hope he trips over the coffee table and gets a rolled up 20 lodged in his brain:)
For the individual programmer, or small company, I think it's very simple. The open source building blocks are free, and freely available, but to use them well and combine them into systems to meet particular requirements takes uncommon knowledge and expertise. The only real way to get that expertise is to join the project, or work in tandem with it in some constructive way (eg CPAN modules, mailing lists, documentation, bug reports). So: more eyes, more open source developers.
And I don't for a moment subscribe to the view put forward above, that support-led work creates a culture of secrecy and obfuscation. Maybe in the corporate IT world, but only because the culture is already leaning that way. Out here in the shanty towns open source keeps us honest: everyone can see the documentation, the code, the other people doing the same thing. Everything is visible and everyone understands that our work is built on other people's work and theirs on ours.
We get paid for what we know and what we can do, and participation is the key to success.
The croc is probably the closest thing to a dinosaur still alive today. (Birds, though descended from dinosaurs, have grown feathers and stuff.) That's less evolution, isn't it?
obpedant: No, it's just less visible change. Everything that is alive today has undergone exactly the same amount of evolution.
The most limiting aspect comes from one of the web's strengths, that it's based on a very simple request-response protocol. This means that you can't update the browser from the server.
Er, no. This is fair enough as an explanation of why the web is both robust and frequently crappy, but unfortunately the point with google maps is precisely that it doesn't work that way.
One of the reasons GM is so distinctive is that it uses xmlhttp to retrieve data behind the scenes in response to page navigation. Once you arrive at the maps page there is no more click-wait-load, and I for one was startled to see how joyful it is to be liberated from all that.
There is less reason than ever to use Flash or Java on the client side.
Eight hundred dollars? Plus accommodation, plus flights, and plus tutorials? I would love to spend the afternoon talking to Perrin Harkins about profiling and preforking, and I'm sure it would help me enormously, but really, who's got $2grand to drop on that except corporate drones with training budgets to burn? Not fun. Back to the mailing lists with me.
I've just been through the logs for one of mine. It's a moderately busy site at around half a million pages a month, and doesn't have any bias towards the readers of CERT warnings (it's a human rights organisation). The numbers really have shifted a bit: six months ago we were seeing 92 or 93% Explorer and less than 2% Mozilla: this month it's 85% and 7%.
This tunnel was described on our regional BBC tv news as a 'secret conduit between Manchester and Salford built during the cold war to safeguard communications'. I quote roughly. They also mentioned that it was 40 metres down.
All this was accompanied by some very Dr Strangelove images of corrugated tunnels and antiquated switchgear, a smooth man from British Telecom (who seemed very calm for someone whose secret underground nuclear bunker was on fire) and the sad beeping of disconnected call centre workers trying to close deals with each other.
Do I correctly understand that you don't want a solar-powered jacket-charger because going outside will give you wrinkles? And that you would consider hanging the jacket outside with all your gadgetry in it, but have decided against it because the jacket might be bleached by the sun?
It is possible that you are not the target market for this garment.
it's not just the committee on scientific dishonesty, which is incidentally a highly respectable danish quango that has thoroughly derailed Lomborg's career. Every reputable scientific journal has poured scorn not only on his conclusions but on his methods, his choice of data and his analyses. It's corporate pseudo-science of the most depressing kind.
this is from Nature, for example:
"It is a mass of poorly digested material, deeply flawed in its selection of examples and analysis."
and from Scientific American:
"Even where his statistical analyses are valid, his interpretations are frequently off the mark."
For the whole story I recommend Mark Lynas excellent overview. It's not impartial, as the pie incident will quickly make clear, but it's very thorough and he knows his stuff.
ps. the only positive article I've seen with any depth was in Wired at the height of the bubble, and can be summarised:
There's very little relation between what apple pays for this chip and what I will end up paying for the new laptop when i skip down to tottenham court road in november and fisticuff my way to the front of the queue. The component and assembly cost of the machine creates a floor beneath which the price cannot easily go, but that's it. what we pay depends on three factors. Surprise, fear and, oh wait:
1. apple's long-term strategy for amortising its development costs, which are considerably higher than any other pc manufacturer. Dell has none of apple's software development and R&D costs, to name but two. Those costs are an investment that underpins the entire product line, and apple will recoup them wherever it thinks it can get away with it.
2. the perceived value of the item and the brand. Apple excels at the intangibles: out of box experience, the appearance of exclusivity, the strange idea that this product of corporate america is rebellious. And some not so intangible qualities: the coherence of software and hardware, the emphasis on luxury finish and spec (the wide screens, the sheer fuck-you of all that white and sheer). That's what I buy them for, and they sure do make me pay for it. But i am vain and like pretty things and always come back for more.
3. What the market will bear. As long as apple is content to occupy its small but solid bit of aesthetic high ground, quite a lot is how much the market will bear. They're flourishing in a dustbowl at the moment. When they try and compete in the cut-price sector, they always crash. Even the original imac just hovered near the moshpit like a pretty uptown flower. But Steve seems to know this well, and anyway he doesn't like all those nasty grabby people, so they're cosy for now.
Pardon my going on. It always strikes me as odd when people in this silly but delightful toyshop start acting like it's a logical place. The modern pc world is a child of Jobs, not Woz.
a lot of picky criticisms here, most of which seem to miss the point in bizarrely obvious ways. it's not a new set of software licenses, it's not a position in the OSI/catfight, it's not even pretending to be a panacea or simplify anything that's happening already.
the varous open source software licenses have to deal with all the complexity of a medium where each product is compound, divisible, modifiable and copiable. that's why they're either very very short or very very long. For anything more restrictive than the MIT license's 'whatever, dude, but i made it', it gets complicated.
what cc are trying to do, like many others, is take the principles of the open source movement, and some of the lessons learned there, and apply them to the broader field of creative production. Unlike many others, they're trying to make it easy to use, without concealing the complexity of the subject, and I think they've pulled out exactly the right three questions to do that.
I get this kind of question all the time: i'm one part programmer and one part artist, most of my friends are wholly one or the other, and it's hard work trying to make sense of open source to writers, activists, people who just make things. The open part they tend to like, but the source part makes no sense at all. compile what?
Still, they eventually get this vague idea that someone else could take what they're doing, do something interesting with it and bring it back, and the light bulb goes off: their creative monologue will turn into a conversation, they'll gain ideas and confidence and get better at what they do. But how? And where to start? Go to GNU? I don't think so. Even opencontent.org gets all hair-shirt legal at you.
CC is friendly, supportive and prepared to put the money into lawyering things for the benefit of others. It would benefit from more historical and ideological context, a bit of cheering up and more clear recommendations to go with the questions, but I for one am grateful for a bit of potentially important work well done, even if I never use it because the GPL works fine for what I make.
think you're missing the point there. This _is_ your home entertainment system. it replaces every single one of your air-filled separately-controlled champagne silver boxes with a single six inch cube that you can play games on too.
(with the likely exception of a decent av power amp, which you can hide)
oh, i'm sorry. I thought this was the short women and gay men united to liberate the three-legged moose rat meeting and group sing-song. i must have taken the wrong turning way back there where people were having a conversation about digital rights management.
what was it you were saying, dear? oh my, you do look tense. come over here and settle down, that's right.
who modded this freak up, by the way? shame on you.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already happening, as it does in every computing medium: layers of abstraction build up to meet less expert users and more expert users create new possibilities on top of them. The kids want rails, not DBI. It's very likely that in ten years' time building your own LAMP stack equivalent will seem as sensible as as soldering together your own computer does now. There will still be people who do it, but they'll be the geniuses and the ones who live in faraday cages.
In that world, the winner is the one who determines the standard interfaces at the back and delivers the eyeballs at the front. Google is very well placed indeed.
That's not really very helpful. I still feel like an expat perl programmer but I have rails/nginx sites that see over 100,000 people a day without any difficulty. They're clustered over four servers, none of which peaks at more than a half of its capacity. Five years ago I was running similarly busy sites under mod_perl and apache 1.3.x. The architecture was more powerful but less robust. I could do much all sorts of interesting things with the apache lifecycle - rails feels like lego by comparison - but the whole assembly was flaky and temperamental, each mod_perl process took up to 50MB and I lived in constant fear of the whole thing falling over.
That probably has as much to do with my code quality as anything else (and the 'interesting things') but it does show that the modern high level frameworks are a viable alternative. Rails doesn't scale well but it does cluster well, and hardware is cheap. I miss the quality of people you get in the perl community, the quality of documentation (out here they think that having a blog counts) and the cheerful absurdism. I don't miss the posturing and strop, and in terms of getting things done I'm much better off than I was.
Logic faulty. Species that are able to produce vitamin C at low cost are likely to make more liberal metabolic use of it than species that have to find and eat it. They'll use it as a general purpose reducing agent where we presumably use something else, and no doubt lots of other things that I have no idea about.
There is no reason at all why I should eat as much vitamin C as a goat would make, though I am very pleased to discover (on wikipedia) this new unit of measurement.
I'm sure your main point is correct, and that the RDA of vitamin C is lower than the optimum intake for perfect health. I imagine that's usually the case, as the RDAs were introduced in an age where the concern was to protect the health of the poor, not to optimise the fitness of the rich.
The rest of your argument is nonsense, and no amount of emboldening will make it persuasive. No human being in history has managed to eat 15g of vitamin C every day - that would be 300 oranges - but we seem to get by.
Not impossible, just difficult, and isn't the whole point of the Gates Foundation to place money selectively in order to "reduce inequity and improve lives"? Now they're saying that putting money in the right place is a problem too hard to work out.
You're right, but the decision they've made here is much less complex than that. Nobody can objectively weigh up which is worse, BAT or BAe, but anyone can say "I'm not going to put my assets at the disposal of tobacco and arms companies". When someone like the Gates Foundation says that the pension funds and investment banks who channel all this money will take notice and offer an alternative. Instead, rather than thinking through the problem of how to do the greatest good with a huge pile of money, the Foundation has decided to seek the greatest possible return, regardless of the consequences, and do good later.
Next thing you know, people will be using torture to fight for freedom. Oh, wait.
and here in the north of England it is perfectly obvious that the new Nintendo Why Aye will be a great success.
Come on. 12" powerbook and a phone (which can also be gps and pda, if you like). What else do you need?
As for the bag, if you want to carry a load of fragile equipment in comfort and safety, ask a photojournalist. They've always had to do it, and to my mind the best equipment bag you can buy is a billingham. You could fit everything in a Hadley and not even look like a geek*, or add an SLR and some clothes and it'll still fit in a 445. Mine is over 20 years old and only just broken in.
*If that's a drawback, consider a Lowepro instead. But do you really want that 'this is where I keep my expensive laptop' look?
or rather he was very wrong then, but he'll be right one day. wifi is the key.
The only thing that could knock the ipod off its perch is a player that provides the same nearly-transparent play-you-anything service as an ipod and itunes do together, but without needing a computer to connect it to the world. The mp3 player as computer satellite is a solved problem.
I don't think it's going to happen any time soon, either. There are two factors that prevent the mp3 player from functioning as a standalone device:
1. everyone has cds that they still want to use
2. by the time you've got the size and brainpower to present an effective itunes-type interface, you might as well be a laptop.
The first obstacle will dwindle: how many teenagers buy cds now? The second is the key, the reason why microsoft keeps trying to get into the living room and why the only credible threat to the ipod comes from the phone people: because it's the connection that will matter. In five or six years time wifi will be ubiquitous, a designer who is currently in art college gold-leafing her shoes will have a brainwave and find a way to put a useable open-ended record shop on a tiny pocket device, et viola: the ipod is in the corner getting drunk with the walkman. Unless she's working for Apple.
And that, in turn, is another reason why Apple are so right to focus on tying up the content and the means of content-creation. The only way to supersede the ipod is to provide even more direct and personal experience of the media, and the way things are going now, only Apple will be in a position to do that.
Nokia and Amazon together might have a chance, I suppose, but my guess is that in a few years time Microsoft will be suffocating in a shrinking corporate-desktop niche and AppleDisney will be toe to toe with Viacom and Time-Warner (and Sony, if they manage to get PS3 out the door with decent networking).
Could it be because in China they are colluding with an oppressive totalitarian regime to control the flow of information and so helping the regime to remain in power? Whereas in France and Germany they've just made a pragmatic decision to go along with some quaint local laws about what cannot be mentioned.
I agree that the cases are of the same type - and I wish they hadn't capitulated in either case - but in magnitude they're very different and that does matter. It's shoplifting and murder: they're both against the law, but people are correct to be more outraged by one than the other.
Unless they make a strong effort to publicise to the Chinese people the nature and extent of the censorship they live under - and a muttered footnote is not good enough - this is straightforward, profit-motivated evil corporate behaviour. Very disappointing.
Could this be any more blatant a puff?
:)
Some tousled corporate parasite is right now celebrating his ability to generate authentic grassroots excitement in a tailored halo demographic that combines youthshare with techster credibility and so cements the brand in the minds of 20something pre-life-crisis shoppers as both a technology leader and a style marker.
What they don't realise is that this is slashdot on a saturday night and all he's getting is six year old kernel hackers and grumpy old toads like me, who are not only incapable of getting excited about yet another sucker gadget, they're also the least likely consumer role models in the world.
They can make as many xboxes as they want, and they will.
I hope he trips over the coffee table and gets a rolled up 20 lodged in his brain
For the individual programmer, or small company, I think it's very simple. The open source building blocks are free, and freely available, but to use them well and combine them into systems to meet particular requirements takes uncommon knowledge and expertise. The only real way to get that expertise is to join the project, or work in tandem with it in some constructive way (eg CPAN modules, mailing lists, documentation, bug reports). So: more eyes, more open source developers.
And I don't for a moment subscribe to the view put forward above, that support-led work creates a culture of secrecy and obfuscation. Maybe in the corporate IT world, but only because the culture is already leaning that way. Out here in the shanty towns open source keeps us honest: everyone can see the documentation, the code, the other people doing the same thing. Everything is visible and everyone understands that our work is built on other people's work and theirs on ours.
We get paid for what we know and what we can do, and participation is the key to success.
obpedant: No, it's just less visible change. Everything that is alive today has undergone exactly the same amount of evolution.
Er, no. This is fair enough as an explanation of why the web is both robust and frequently crappy, but unfortunately the point with google maps is precisely that it doesn't work that way.
One of the reasons GM is so distinctive is that it uses xmlhttp to retrieve data behind the scenes in response to page navigation. Once you arrive at the maps page there is no more click-wait-load, and I for one was startled to see how joyful it is to be liberated from all that.
There is less reason than ever to use Flash or Java on the client side.
So now the US military is making decisions based on Ask Slashdot discussions? That explains a lot.
luxury!
we had to play our 3d space games in CGA. everything was green, and pixels were the size of peas.
and we were glad!
sadly, this is all true.
Eight hundred dollars? Plus accommodation, plus flights, and plus tutorials? I would love to spend the afternoon talking to Perrin Harkins about profiling and preforking, and I'm sure it would help me enormously, but really, who's got $2grand to drop on that except corporate drones with training budgets to burn? Not fun. Back to the mailing lists with me.
I've just been through the logs for one of mine. It's a moderately busy site at around half a million pages a month, and doesn't have any bias towards the readers of CERT warnings (it's a human rights organisation). The numbers really have shifted a bit: six months ago we were seeing 92 or 93% Explorer and less than 2% Mozilla: this month it's 85% and 7%.
This tunnel was described on our regional BBC tv news as a 'secret conduit between Manchester and Salford built during the cold war to safeguard communications'. I quote roughly. They also mentioned that it was 40 metres down.
All this was accompanied by some very Dr Strangelove images of corrugated tunnels and antiquated switchgear, a smooth man from British Telecom (who seemed very calm for someone whose secret underground nuclear bunker was on fire) and the sad beeping of disconnected call centre workers trying to close deals with each other.
Do I correctly understand that you don't want a solar-powered jacket-charger because going outside will give you wrinkles? And that you would consider hanging the jacket outside with all your gadgetry in it, but have decided against it because the jacket might be bleached by the sun?
It is possible that you are not the target market for this garment.
it's not just the committee on scientific dishonesty, which is incidentally a highly respectable danish quango that has thoroughly derailed Lomborg's career. Every reputable scientific journal has poured scorn not only on his conclusions but on his methods, his choice of data and his analyses. It's corporate pseudo-science of the most depressing kind.
this is from Nature, for example:
"It is a mass of poorly digested material, deeply flawed in its selection of examples and analysis."
and from Scientific American:
"Even where his statistical analyses are valid, his interpretations are frequently off the mark."
For the whole story I recommend Mark Lynas excellent overview. It's not impartial, as the pie incident will quickly make clear, but it's very thorough and he knows his stuff.
ps. the only positive article I've seen with any depth was in Wired at the height of the bubble, and can be summarised:
1. burn everything
2. think of something
3. ???
4. profit!
There's very little relation between what apple pays for this chip and what I will end up paying for the new laptop when i skip down to tottenham court road in november and fisticuff my way to the front of the queue. The component and assembly cost of the machine creates a floor beneath which the price cannot easily go, but that's it. what we pay depends on three factors. Surprise, fear and, oh wait:
1. apple's long-term strategy for amortising its development costs, which are considerably higher than any other pc manufacturer. Dell has none of apple's software development and R&D costs, to name but two. Those costs are an investment that underpins the entire product line, and apple will recoup them wherever it thinks it can get away with it.
2. the perceived value of the item and the brand. Apple excels at the intangibles: out of box experience, the appearance of exclusivity, the strange idea that this product of corporate america is rebellious. And some not so intangible qualities: the coherence of software and hardware, the emphasis on luxury finish and spec (the wide screens, the sheer fuck-you of all that white and sheer). That's what I buy them for, and they sure do make me pay for it. But i am vain and like pretty things and always come back for more.
3. What the market will bear. As long as apple is content to occupy its small but solid bit of aesthetic high ground, quite a lot is how much the market will bear. They're flourishing in a dustbowl at the moment. When they try and compete in the cut-price sector, they always crash. Even the original imac just hovered near the moshpit like a pretty uptown flower. But Steve seems to know this well, and anyway he doesn't like all those nasty grabby people, so they're cosy for now.
Pardon my going on. It always strikes me as odd when people in this silly but delightful toyshop start acting like it's a logical place. The modern pc world is a child of Jobs, not Woz.
...and Boromir was the brother, not the son, of Faramir. You know, I'm beginning to suspect that this person isn't the real Faramir at all.
a lot of picky criticisms here, most of which seem to miss the point in bizarrely obvious ways. it's not a new set of software licenses, it's not a position in the OSI/catfight, it's not even pretending to be a panacea or simplify anything that's happening already.
the varous open source software licenses have to deal with all the complexity of a medium where each product is compound, divisible, modifiable and copiable. that's why they're either very very short or very very long. For anything more restrictive than the MIT license's 'whatever, dude, but i made it', it gets complicated.
what cc are trying to do, like many others, is take the principles of the open source movement, and some of the lessons learned there, and apply them to the broader field of creative production. Unlike many others, they're trying to make it easy to use, without concealing the complexity of the subject, and I think they've pulled out exactly the right three questions to do that.
I get this kind of question all the time: i'm one part programmer and one part artist, most of my friends are wholly one or the other, and it's hard work trying to make sense of open source to writers, activists, people who just make things. The open part they tend to like, but the source part makes no sense at all. compile what?
Still, they eventually get this vague idea that someone else could take what they're doing, do something interesting with it and bring it back, and the light bulb goes off: their creative monologue will turn into a conversation, they'll gain ideas and confidence and get better at what they do. But how? And where to start? Go to GNU? I don't think so. Even opencontent.org gets all hair-shirt legal at you.
CC is friendly, supportive and prepared to put the money into lawyering things for the benefit of others. It would benefit from more historical and ideological context, a bit of cheering up and more clear recommendations to go with the questions, but I for one am grateful for a bit of potentially important work well done, even if I never use it because the GPL works fine for what I make.
think you're missing the point there. This _is_ your home entertainment system. it replaces every single one of your air-filled separately-controlled champagne silver boxes with a single six inch cube that you can play games on too.
(with the likely exception of a decent av power amp, which you can hide)
oh, i'm sorry. I thought this was the short women and gay men united to liberate the three-legged moose rat meeting and group sing-song. i must have taken the wrong turning way back there where people were having a conversation about digital rights management.
what was it you were saying, dear? oh my, you do look tense. come over here and settle down, that's right.
who modded this freak up, by the way? shame on you.
For everyone that can't read what happens when you use a speedstep chipset with a non speedstep cpu is that...
and for those of you watching in black and white, the green ball is the one behind the blue.
(sorry. you had to be in england in the 70's for this one.)