It could be the same phenomenon that causes Intelligent Design advocates to exclaim - "My gosh, it's inconceivable that it wasn't deliberate!" ; 419 scams are just a successful phenotype (or memotype?) that happens to fit a niche. Their total incompetence selects a very particular kind of credulous idiot that previously would not have been available in such numbers, but the internet produces a global village, with a ready supply of village idiots. Interpreting it as being an intentional tactic may be reading too much into it.
Music is a useful contribution. Music improves your quality of life. If it didn't people wouldn't listen to it. Sure, it's not a design for a working fusion reactor, but if that was easy, everyone would be doing it. It has value, or no-one would pay for it. The same goes for movies and games. After all, if all your material needs are served, what else is there but entertainment? It would be great to live in a world where that was the only concern, but until then, I can listen to music to lift my spirits a little.
People don't ignore copyright because it's a failed social contract. People ignore copyright because it's easier and cheaper to copy things than it ever was before. I remember when I was a kid, copying Spectrum games using a dual tape deck, or a memory dumper. It was a pain in the butt. You had to buy C60 cassettes. You had to wait MINUTES to copy each thing. Then I copied Amiga games using two disc drives. The hardware was much more expensive, but you could get more copied in much less time. I stopped copying in my "PC" era, mostly because I was in gainful employment and could afford my games, didn't have a social circle that included PC gamers, and because the internet sucked (modems, yuck). I still don't copy PC games, but I did accept a few GB of NDS ROM images from a colleague at work ; I don't feel really guilty about it, because I don't play any of them - most of them suck. It would have sucked even more spending £30 a pop to find that out. Most of the games I actually bought for DS I played extensively, because I chose games I knew were good. But it was trivially easy to copy them ; shove in a USB stick, run one command, hey presto. Not once did I think "Hey, I'm sticking it to those damn publishers and their evil lobbying to destroy the social contract of copyright". I just buy fewer DS games because I know so many of them suck.
I agree that they are destroying the social contract though. You see these creaking old pop stars lobbying to continue earning a living off a piece of work they did 50 or 60 years ago, and think "wouldn't it be great if I could earn money for every piece of code I write every year". The reality is that their label fucked them, and now they are lobbying for their label to retain the right to fuck them a little longer.
What they don't get is that if the copyright expired on their recordings, nothing would stop them releasing them for themselves ; unlike right now, where the label controls what you do with your work, you might have a chance of making a few bucks without having most of it clawed back as recoupable expenses. As TFA points out, people will pay extra cash for coffee if they thought the farmer got a fair shake - well, I'm willing to bet that the same applies to music. It definitely applies to games - I know people who will pay extra for Indy games, buy them direct from the developer, rather than pay a discounted rate on Steam, because it puts more cash in the pocket it belongs in. Well, if you sell CDs without the cut for the label, you could easily cut the price and still make more than you were getting in royalties - and make sure you sell it as the "real" album, "Fair Trade" for the artist.
Yeah, it continues to bug me that MonoDevelop lags so far behind it's Windows origin, SharpDevelop, when one of the selling points of.NET is cross-platform code - surely you should just be able to build SharpDevelop for Linux...
Print them as PGP encrypted datagrams. They'll carry more text and require more storage as bitmaps until they figure that one out, which could take a while.
I believe the point is that it only takes one skilled guy to come up with the design of a case for an object which is reproduced a few million times.
The assembly is then broken down into simple one-step procedures, which you assign to one worker apiece. Hence assembly line. This produces jobs where you do the same single motion, day in, day out. Until the day comes that they make a robot dextrous enough to do your step, then you are out of a job.
Unless bespoke boutique mobile phone case design really takes off (hint : it won't, for all sorts of social and economic reasons), the majority of jobs in any mass production economy are going to be repetitive, and dull, and under constant threat of replacement with a robot, and as such, low paid. The research, development, design, and prototyping work is by it's very nature, going to be limited to a small group of workers.
It used to be a moral position ; companies used to build whole towns, complete with schools, churches, etc. See Port Sunlight
Lever's aims were "to socialise and Christianise business relations and get back to that close family brotherhood that existed in the good old days of hand labour." He claimed that Port Sunlight was an exercise in profit sharing, but rather than share profits directly, he invested them in the village. He said, "It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation."
While it seems patronizing and regimented to us upper-middle class whiteys, we're the same demographic that probably moan about the wasteful excesses of the lower classes ; the "demon" drink, cigarettes, and more recently, junk-food and soda-pop have all come up for attack.
It wouldn't work today though. It only got done by Lever Brothers because the company was ruled by an oligarchy of owners. Publicly owned companies are deprived of strong leadership in the most part by having stockholders ; they have to go the way of the sheep, or the lemming.
I can't match the sheer eloquence of the sibling poster, but this is bullshit ; all the GNU FAQs explicitly state it's totally OK to make money from Free software. It's Free as in Freedom, not as in beer.
Would you tolerate Ford selling you a car, but not allowing you to peek under the bonnet, fix it yourself, soup it up, change things around? What if your contract didn't allow you to sell on your pimped out car? What about if you wanted to give it away to your son when he gets his license, but they didn't allow you to do that? Anti-freedom, right?
But we tolerate the same position for software.
The man takes the extreme position ; I admire his conviction and the balls it takes to live the way he does. He *has* to, because if he compromised, a horde of paid shills from the proprietary software world would fight each other for the right to be the first to point it out. His dedication is impressive. I would be a bit uneasy about putting him up in my home for a speaking engagement, but I would hope to have some fraction of his courage and support him.
My VB6 devkit includes a whole bunch of stuff that make it tolerable ; one of them is a mousewheel plugin for the IDE. Also a text search that searches everything and supports regex, a "find all callers" routine, error handler insertion, and a decent stack-ish error handling library. Full stack traces with line numbers in VB6 code are very useful.
I like.NET but have avoided VB.NET assiduously ; it's almost, but not quite, completely unlike VB6, and I don't want it ruining my VB6 knowledgebase for my retirement.
The VB6 compiler produced native code. Most of the sloth came from the runtime libraries, and most of that from string handling : rolling your own StringBuilder class fixes most of that.
Java has the same issues, also using an immutable string class, but they fixed it by hacking the compiler to recognise where you are doing string concatenation in a loop and make a StringBuilder out of it instead..NET also produces native code, eventually.
Performance problems in any of them are usually down to bad algorithms, or using a mass of bloaty libraries to compensate for a lack of time.
It comes back to distribution ; because the host program and the plugin have incompatible licenses, they cannot be distributed together. The legal position of someone who combines a GPL plugin with a non-free program is probably moot unless he is distributing it, but he cannot offer a recipient the source of the non-free program under GPL terms unless he is the copyright holder, or has received the sources under GPL himself, so he can't distribute it.
The typical interpretation of "distribution" is outside the organization you work in, if it's on a corporate basis, so technically you could prepare an aggregation of non-free code + GPL plugin for your internal users, but you can't distribute it otherwise.
The key word here is "library" ; aggregation typically only covers programs running in separate processes. Communication via sockets and pipes is permissible.
If the summary had said "The lzo utility", fair enough. But if it's linking the library, that's linking. Pre-linking is just linking.
And his (insightful) point was that a porn film involving these acts can have *explicit* consent, have greatly reduced risks of injury (I think the average S&M flick probably has a script and performers who will accept "safe words", unlike the majority of contact sports, but probably something it has in common with WWF), but remains illegal under this law, despite being less dangerous, just because people are getting their rocks off instead of screaming until their face goes purple while drinking beer and waving a big foam finger.
I'll bet I know which one leads to more uncontrolled punch-ups and permanent injuries (to unconsenting participants).
Well, for example, porn that depicts violent acts, even between consensual adults, is illegal in the UK.
The performers have a defence as long as the acts they participate in are acts which a person is legally able to consent to in the UK, but the photographer and others present (sound crew, director, etc) are on the hook.
A relatively recent law as well, so not some antiquated sodomy law.
The point is that it's difficult to predict the relevance of a given technology. If you have a mandate to only explore "commercially viable" science, that means only exploring stuff that boring suits think might generate a bottom line. But people are terrible at predicting what will be useful and what won't.
Ultimately, yes, I agree, pie-in-the-sky science projects can irritate me, but making all science "commercially viable" is inevitably going to reduce the amount of science that actually produces results useful in the technical arts.
The default position right now with many Linux distributions is that you can insert a CD or USB thumb, maybe push a function key during boot, and try them out.
With secure boot you will have to go into the BIOS, and disable something labelled as a security feature. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that, while on the face of it, Microsoft are insisting that OEMs include Custom Mode, but also quietly insisting that that switch pops up a nasty-looking dialog which says "Are you SURE you want the Evil Haxxors to root your machine!?!"
People trying Linux for the first time are going to go "Huh, I thought Linux was supposed to be more secure, yet here it is, making me disable security features just to run it!". Or they are going to go "Huh, a message saying 'This operating system bootloader is corrupted or infected with a virus." ; I guess this Linux stuff don't work as well as they say it does."
It puts a barrier in front of new user adoption of Linux, which is, of course, a highly desirable effect for Microsoft. Redhat are calling them out and getting them to sign their bootloaders to avoid this effect. It sticks in the craw somewhat that they have to beg askance of Microsoft to get their binaries signed, but I think Redhat are probably taking the best path available to them.
Secure boot is an otherwise desirable feature, in the control of the user, but that's never going to happen with an MS operating system.
I think that "wiki" aspect of Wave was one of the things that made people who got it, like it, but there were so many other things like the way it would keep track of which bits of the wave you had read, draw your attention to new bits, allow you to embed active forms and gadgets, etc. And the ability to see all simultaneous edits, with no exclusive locking, was superior to most wiki software which will, if you are lucky, let you know if someone else is editing the page before you edit it yourself.
Etherpad was/is similar, and indeed, swallowed by Google to see what they could learn from it, but only worked with plain text and not all the more useful rich content.
I think of Wave as having great potential for collaboration ; an app that merges the ability to collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously with both other humans AND automated processes.
You could say the same thing about soda containing phosphoric acid, or any of a number of other habits of western living. Correlation is not causation.
It is very difficult for OSM to meet this high quality, specially because you need a differential GPS (DGPS) to collect these.
If they have a means of averaging all the different GPS tracks they receive to produce their data, that wouldn't matter so much. You could even crowdsource this ; have a task list for people who are registered as "Open Street Mappers" in a particular region to go and recollect given data points to improve their accuracy.
Speak for yourself ; for my work, which has some fairly heavy data sets, I muddle through on a 64GB SSD. I'm tempted to upgrade to a 128GB model, because it's sometimes a bit tight and I'd like to have room for my music collection (12GB).
Games ; I currently have a 1TB partition devoted to game installs. It's not remotely full yet.
Video : this is the biggie. My HTPC currently has 1TB of storage as well. Paradoxically, I think it would probably be better if it had less storage - we just tend to accumulate a huge load of old crap that we're never going to watch. It might be nice to rip all my DVDs for instant access, but that's a pretty tedious task.
Backup : I don't back up my video, because it's not that critical to me (all being broadcast video, it came free, so I don't value it much). Because my work drives are small, I don't need much backup. My current 2TB external drive has more than half it's space free, and I'm not selective about what I back up, and have a 3 month retention time.
I have about 2.5TB of storage lying around on my desk not even wired to anything. Most of it is a single 1.5TB drive.
Now ; my backup strategy is not sufficiently paranoid. While most of my work is stored elsewhere in VCS repositories anyway, I could conceivably be inconvenienced by a failure. So I can see a need for a second backup device, which would need to be 500GB of storage. I currently have 5 times this lying around on my desk, so my problem isn't storage, it's apathy.
The people who do need all this storage, I'm sad to say, are probably torrenting a lot, because that's the only way a consumer accumulates that much data that they don't have a read-only media copy of already.
Austerity is a tool to move power and money into corporate hands. This is why the IMF always insists on it when they offer emergency loans.
They embark on a systematic program of fucking up public services until they collapse, then corporations can pick up the slack and start turning the screw.
Slashdot Mirror
It could be the same phenomenon that causes Intelligent Design advocates to exclaim - "My gosh, it's inconceivable that it wasn't deliberate!" ; 419 scams are just a successful phenotype (or memotype?) that happens to fit a niche. Their total incompetence selects a very particular kind of credulous idiot that previously would not have been available in such numbers, but the internet produces a global village, with a ready supply of village idiots. Interpreting it as being an intentional tactic may be reading too much into it.
Music is a useful contribution. Music improves your quality of life. If it didn't people wouldn't listen to it. Sure, it's not a design for a working fusion reactor, but if that was easy, everyone would be doing it. It has value, or no-one would pay for it. The same goes for movies and games. After all, if all your material needs are served, what else is there but entertainment? It would be great to live in a world where that was the only concern, but until then, I can listen to music to lift my spirits a little.
People don't ignore copyright because it's a failed social contract. People ignore copyright because it's easier and cheaper to copy things than it ever was before. I remember when I was a kid, copying Spectrum games using a dual tape deck, or a memory dumper. It was a pain in the butt. You had to buy C60 cassettes. You had to wait MINUTES to copy each thing. Then I copied Amiga games using two disc drives. The hardware was much more expensive, but you could get more copied in much less time. I stopped copying in my "PC" era, mostly because I was in gainful employment and could afford my games, didn't have a social circle that included PC gamers, and because the internet sucked (modems, yuck). I still don't copy PC games, but I did accept a few GB of NDS ROM images from a colleague at work ; I don't feel really guilty about it, because I don't play any of them - most of them suck. It would have sucked even more spending £30 a pop to find that out. Most of the games I actually bought for DS I played extensively, because I chose games I knew were good. But it was trivially easy to copy them ; shove in a USB stick, run one command, hey presto. Not once did I think "Hey, I'm sticking it to those damn publishers and their evil lobbying to destroy the social contract of copyright". I just buy fewer DS games because I know so many of them suck.
I agree that they are destroying the social contract though. You see these creaking old pop stars lobbying to continue earning a living off a piece of work they did 50 or 60 years ago, and think "wouldn't it be great if I could earn money for every piece of code I write every year". The reality is that their label fucked them, and now they are lobbying for their label to retain the right to fuck them a little longer.
What they don't get is that if the copyright expired on their recordings, nothing would stop them releasing them for themselves ; unlike right now, where the label controls what you do with your work, you might have a chance of making a few bucks without having most of it clawed back as recoupable expenses. As TFA points out, people will pay extra cash for coffee if they thought the farmer got a fair shake - well, I'm willing to bet that the same applies to music. It definitely applies to games - I know people who will pay extra for Indy games, buy them direct from the developer, rather than pay a discounted rate on Steam, because it puts more cash in the pocket it belongs in. Well, if you sell CDs without the cut for the label, you could easily cut the price and still make more than you were getting in royalties - and make sure you sell it as the "real" album, "Fair Trade" for the artist.
Yeah, it continues to bug me that MonoDevelop lags so far behind it's Windows origin, SharpDevelop, when one of the selling points of .NET is cross-platform code - surely you should just be able to build SharpDevelop for Linux...
Print them as PGP encrypted datagrams. They'll carry more text and require more storage as bitmaps until they figure that one out, which could take a while.
I believe the point is that it only takes one skilled guy to come up with the design of a case for an object which is reproduced a few million times.
The assembly is then broken down into simple one-step procedures, which you assign to one worker apiece. Hence assembly line. This produces jobs where you do the same single motion, day in, day out. Until the day comes that they make a robot dextrous enough to do your step, then you are out of a job.
Unless bespoke boutique mobile phone case design really takes off (hint : it won't, for all sorts of social and economic reasons), the majority of jobs in any mass production economy are going to be repetitive, and dull, and under constant threat of replacement with a robot, and as such, low paid. The research, development, design, and prototyping work is by it's very nature, going to be limited to a small group of workers.
And the custom fitting to your hearing loss ; like setting a reaaaly tiny graphic equalizer.
They're still taking though - they still ship their product in the nation they just left. They just don't pay *any* taxes there any more.
Even if they were taking, they gave *something* back, like complements on a first date.
It used to be a moral position ; companies used to build whole towns, complete with schools, churches, etc. See Port Sunlight
Lever's aims were "to socialise and Christianise business relations and get back to that close family brotherhood that existed in the good old days of hand labour." He claimed that Port Sunlight was an exercise in profit sharing, but rather than share profits directly, he invested them in the village. He said, "It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation."
While it seems patronizing and regimented to us upper-middle class whiteys, we're the same demographic that probably moan about the wasteful excesses of the lower classes ; the "demon" drink, cigarettes, and more recently, junk-food and soda-pop have all come up for attack.
It wouldn't work today though. It only got done by Lever Brothers because the company was ruled by an oligarchy of owners. Publicly owned companies are deprived of strong leadership in the most part by having stockholders ; they have to go the way of the sheep, or the lemming.
I can't match the sheer eloquence of the sibling poster, but this is bullshit ; all the GNU FAQs explicitly state it's totally OK to make money from Free software. It's Free as in Freedom, not as in beer.
Would you tolerate Ford selling you a car, but not allowing you to peek under the bonnet, fix it yourself, soup it up, change things around? What if your contract didn't allow you to sell on your pimped out car? What about if you wanted to give it away to your son when he gets his license, but they didn't allow you to do that? Anti-freedom, right?
But we tolerate the same position for software.
The man takes the extreme position ; I admire his conviction and the balls it takes to live the way he does. He *has* to, because if he compromised, a horde of paid shills from the proprietary software world would fight each other for the right to be the first to point it out. His dedication is impressive. I would be a bit uneasy about putting him up in my home for a speaking engagement, but I would hope to have some fraction of his courage and support him.
My VB6 devkit includes a whole bunch of stuff that make it tolerable ; one of them is a mousewheel plugin for the IDE. Also a text search that searches everything and supports regex, a "find all callers" routine, error handler insertion, and a decent stack-ish error handling library. Full stack traces with line numbers in VB6 code are very useful.
I like .NET but have avoided VB.NET assiduously ; it's almost, but not quite, completely unlike VB6, and I don't want it ruining my VB6 knowledgebase for my retirement.
The VB6 compiler produced native code. Most of the sloth came from the runtime libraries, and most of that from string handling : rolling your own StringBuilder class fixes most of that.
Java has the same issues, also using an immutable string class, but they fixed it by hacking the compiler to recognise where you are doing string concatenation in a loop and make a StringBuilder out of it instead. .NET also produces native code, eventually.
Performance problems in any of them are usually down to bad algorithms, or using a mass of bloaty libraries to compensate for a lack of time.
It comes back to distribution ; because the host program and the plugin have incompatible licenses, they cannot be distributed together. The legal position of someone who combines a GPL plugin with a non-free program is probably moot unless he is distributing it, but he cannot offer a recipient the source of the non-free program under GPL terms unless he is the copyright holder, or has received the sources under GPL himself, so he can't distribute it.
The typical interpretation of "distribution" is outside the organization you work in, if it's on a corporate basis, so technically you could prepare an aggregation of non-free code + GPL plugin for your internal users, but you can't distribute it otherwise.
The key word here is "library" ; aggregation typically only covers programs running in separate processes. Communication via sockets and pipes is permissible.
If the summary had said "The lzo utility", fair enough. But if it's linking the library, that's linking. Pre-linking is just linking.
I just got why Quark's bar in DS9 has a barfly character called "Morn".
And his (insightful) point was that a porn film involving these acts can have *explicit* consent, have greatly reduced risks of injury (I think the average S&M flick probably has a script and performers who will accept "safe words", unlike the majority of contact sports, but probably something it has in common with WWF), but remains illegal under this law, despite being less dangerous, just because people are getting their rocks off instead of screaming until their face goes purple while drinking beer and waving a big foam finger.
I'll bet I know which one leads to more uncontrolled punch-ups and permanent injuries (to unconsenting participants).
Well, for example, porn that depicts violent acts, even between consensual adults, is illegal in the UK.
The performers have a defence as long as the acts they participate in are acts which a person is legally able to consent to in the UK, but the photographer and others present (sound crew, director, etc) are on the hook.
A relatively recent law as well, so not some antiquated sodomy law.
The point is that it's difficult to predict the relevance of a given technology. If you have a mandate to only explore "commercially viable" science, that means only exploring stuff that boring suits think might generate a bottom line. But people are terrible at predicting what will be useful and what won't.
Ultimately, yes, I agree, pie-in-the-sky science projects can irritate me, but making all science "commercially viable" is inevitably going to reduce the amount of science that actually produces results useful in the technical arts.
The default position right now with many Linux distributions is that you can insert a CD or USB thumb, maybe push a function key during boot, and try them out.
With secure boot you will have to go into the BIOS, and disable something labelled as a security feature. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that, while on the face of it, Microsoft are insisting that OEMs include Custom Mode, but also quietly insisting that that switch pops up a nasty-looking dialog which says "Are you SURE you want the Evil Haxxors to root your machine!?!"
People trying Linux for the first time are going to go "Huh, I thought Linux was supposed to be more secure, yet here it is, making me disable security features just to run it!". Or they are going to go "Huh, a message saying 'This operating system bootloader is corrupted or infected with a virus." ; I guess this Linux stuff don't work as well as they say it does."
It puts a barrier in front of new user adoption of Linux, which is, of course, a highly desirable effect for Microsoft. Redhat are calling them out and getting them to sign their bootloaders to avoid this effect. It sticks in the craw somewhat that they have to beg askance of Microsoft to get their binaries signed, but I think Redhat are probably taking the best path available to them.
Secure boot is an otherwise desirable feature, in the control of the user, but that's never going to happen with an MS operating system.
Unless all the installed operating systems are signed, you may have to revert to "custom mode" ie, non-secure boot.
Of course, there may be features of Windows that don't work without secure boot, like media playback in full HD, etc.
I think that "wiki" aspect of Wave was one of the things that made people who got it, like it, but there were so many other things like the way it would keep track of which bits of the wave you had read, draw your attention to new bits, allow you to embed active forms and gadgets, etc. And the ability to see all simultaneous edits, with no exclusive locking, was superior to most wiki software which will, if you are lucky, let you know if someone else is editing the page before you edit it yourself.
Etherpad was/is similar, and indeed, swallowed by Google to see what they could learn from it, but only worked with plain text and not all the more useful rich content.
I think of Wave as having great potential for collaboration ; an app that merges the ability to collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously with both other humans AND automated processes.
You could say the same thing about soda containing phosphoric acid, or any of a number of other habits of western living. Correlation is not causation.
It is very difficult for OSM to meet this high quality, specially because you need a differential GPS (DGPS) to collect these.
If they have a means of averaging all the different GPS tracks they receive to produce their data, that wouldn't matter so much. You could even crowdsource this ; have a task list for people who are registered as "Open Street Mappers" in a particular region to go and recollect given data points to improve their accuracy.
We want more storage
Speak for yourself ; for my work, which has some fairly heavy data sets, I muddle through on a 64GB SSD. I'm tempted to upgrade to a 128GB model, because it's sometimes a bit tight and I'd like to have room for my music collection (12GB).
Games ; I currently have a 1TB partition devoted to game installs. It's not remotely full yet.
Video : this is the biggie. My HTPC currently has 1TB of storage as well. Paradoxically, I think it would probably be better if it had less storage - we just tend to accumulate a huge load of old crap that we're never going to watch. It might be nice to rip all my DVDs for instant access, but that's a pretty tedious task.
Backup : I don't back up my video, because it's not that critical to me (all being broadcast video, it came free, so I don't value it much). Because my work drives are small, I don't need much backup. My current 2TB external drive has more than half it's space free, and I'm not selective about what I back up, and have a 3 month retention time.
I have about 2.5TB of storage lying around on my desk not even wired to anything. Most of it is a single 1.5TB drive.
Now ; my backup strategy is not sufficiently paranoid. While most of my work is stored elsewhere in VCS repositories anyway, I could conceivably be inconvenienced by a failure. So I can see a need for a second backup device, which would need to be 500GB of storage. I currently have 5 times this lying around on my desk, so my problem isn't storage, it's apathy.
The people who do need all this storage, I'm sad to say, are probably torrenting a lot, because that's the only way a consumer accumulates that much data that they don't have a read-only media copy of already.
Austerity is a tool to move power and money into corporate hands. This is why the IMF always insists on it when they offer emergency loans.
They embark on a systematic program of fucking up public services until they collapse, then corporations can pick up the slack and start turning the screw.