No, you only are required to give source code to those you distributed a binary too. That has been clear for a long time. For instance Red Hat exclusively gives source to paid enterprise customers, those customers aren't "supposed" to give that source code away to other parties depending on how the contract is written.
Any contract that overrides the "copyleft" nature of the GPL is in violation of the GPL, though, isn't it? So if Red Hat write out contracts that prohibit or restrict their clients' ability to redistribute the code, Red Hat lose the right to sell GPLed code....
Pretending to be Swedish seems to have helped cover their arses when it came to clients in other countries. But as the name's soon to be confined to the history books, I doubt it matters....
A pre-existing game is an enormous black-box, and you're thrusting kids into a whole world of complexity. You need to be really motivated by the end-goal to push through that. You were, most aren't. I remember trying to motivate myself to learn Quake modding. I failed. It was, in the end, simply too complex, and I couldn't work on that level of abstraction. Starting simple means starting without games.
The "way of connecting a game control to a phone" is called Bluetooth. Your phone has is.
The HDMI thing isn't a "bonus" -- it's a feature of your phone. And if it's not a feature of your phone, this device isn't going to magically give you it.
This is "stone soup" sales tactics. Sell you something "magic" that lets you do wonderful things... because you don't know you can already do them....
And my answer is "I'll trade in my desk phone for a softphone if the IT helpdesk promise not to ask me to turn my PC off and back on again when I call up for assistance.";-)
IMO games are the key. I know I learned most of what I know because of games.
I disagree, but that's not to say I agree with the philosophy of the Coderdojo guys. The problem with games as motivation is that it is an attempt to motivate by topic rather than process.
Learning is an inherently rewarding process -- it is a pure form of mental stimulation. If the teaching is effective, it generates flow and the process becomes self-motivating... but to achieve this the process needs to have a low cognitive load and each step must be inherently meaningful.
Games, however, are complex beasts, and in order to teach with games you have to take a lot of shortcuts and provide a lot of "black-box" code that the beginning programmer can't and won't understand, which means the learning experience isn't entirely meaningful. There's really nothing more frustrating than achieving a result under instruction but not really knowing why it's working. You haven't learned the system. Worse -- those black-boxes can be munged up with lots of "simplifications" that not only obscure the code logic, but also reduce the human logic in the system (eg gamemaker, where increasing the score is done by adding a "setscore" event and ticking a little box marked "relative").
Learning programming has to start with learning how to overcome simple problems and slowly upping the complexity -- starting a course on programming with games is like taking someone who has done no maths and no physics and trying to teach them structural engineering.
Another example of bad teaching practice is that old favourite of programming books: "Hello world." Why do we start with a piece of code that doesn't actually do anything? In C, it's particularly bad. When I started learning C at uni, we were compiling and running from a Unix command prompt (or possibly Linux. In second year CS it was definitely Linux, although we were using Solaris in AI.) What would have been more meaningful than writing simple programs that carried out specific mathematical functions as an extension to the BASH command set? Instantly meaningful nd useful. Instead, we were struggling with C's esoteric consol IO functions for weeks in order to be at the stage where we could even start to do anything meaningful.
Whereas we could have been writing nth root programs and typing nthroot 1024 9 and getting the answer 2 within a day or two.
All subjects are easier to learn when every step is meaningful -- games offer no easy path to meaningfulness.
It didn't say anything about curriculum though. It's a great idea - and I'd like to do it, but how? Does it really define that? It's a great idea to teach kinder-gardeners calculus, but you'd have to provide some more specifics on how you intend on doing this for it to make sense to me...
7
"Oh no, you don't want a curriculum! A curriculum would stifle creativity!"
So what do I do then?
"Use your judgement as a teacher!"
OK, but I'm not really a teacher yet -- you're supposed to be showing me how to become a teacher.
"Ah, but I am. The first lesson is that there are no rules, only experience."
Ah, I see. So what have I paid you over a grand for if you can't teach me anything?
"My experience."
Right. Your experience. But you won't tell me what your experience is.
"Exactly. Because every teacher is unique and you have to experience the classroom for yourself to find out what sort of teacher you are."
Can I have my money back then?
"Oh no, because now I've taught you how to be a teacher."
Not strictly a real conversation, but that's how I felt after taking a course in teaching English as a foreign language (and it was a Cambridge-accredited CELTA course, too).
This is the reality of the "liberal" school of pedagogical thought -- there are no rules, only creativity. The problem is that the people who found all the "liberal" methods develop a way of working that is very effective, but are not strictly aware of what they are doing and can't identify the effective core of their method to teach it. They believe they're working without structure and without directing the students, but they have a strong internal structure that they follow and they direct the learners subtly and subconsciously. In the end they often advise strategies that are diametrically opposed to what they actually do. People who try to follow their advice end up either end up misinterpreting it and getting lost, or (worse) following it literally and buggering up the children's education....
Anyone, anywhere who uses a headset to make phone calls looks like an utter twat.
Appearance is subjective. If someone using appropriate equipment for the task looks like an utter twat, you may want to reconsider your outlook on life. Would you criticise a mechanic for using an uncool socket set? Would you tell a motorcyclist he looks like a twat for wearing a safety helmet? Or maybe car seats are for weanies and we should all drive standing up?
Yes, but most companies using VOIP have a bridge and virtual exchange to connect it to the phone network, so as to use it as a soft replacement for the dedicated phone.
I don't think it's "much of Europe", but rather "many companies in Europe", because in my experience, it's all a matter of accounting practices and the "cost culture" of your employer. For years I was without a work mobile, because mobile telephony had been designated a "project expense", whereas every desk had a phone anyway. Most projects were short term and couldn't justify the cost/hassle of a mobile phone, when there was a free alternative. The company also made it difficult to move your number when you moved desk. Useful in that it stopped you getting chased down by clients you were no longer working for, but a right bugger if you wanted to give someone a way to get in touch with you. Official policy was to give out the number for office reception and get transferred.
This particular employer was too stingy to switch wholesale to an internal IP network, which meant "follow-me" numbers were not an option. Although it was always the plan, and with every office refit, they fitted natty Cisco IP phones. But didn't actually use any of their useful features because we couldn't go IP-telephony until every office was properly kitted out. I left the company almost two years ago, and despite many thousands of pounds spent on IP telephony, we still didn't have the "follow-me" numbers implemented anywhere except the call-centre in Wales. But even before I left, mobile phones had finally become standard issue (for new staff only, though(!)) and company policy encouraged usage of MS Messenger internally, so I doubt they'll ever use the full IP telephony. All it ever achieved was buggering up our internet connection... because facilities specced the pipe bandwidth on data requirements, but BT tended to rig up the connection to take the voice bandwidth off the same pipe.
Lovely, fancy, expensive phones that meant we got a vastly inferior service to what we got off the old £10-a-pop BT phones. Progress....
Quite. Anyone who would volunteer to spend 2 years with only 3 other people, and the next 2 with only 7 other people, is clearly a sociopath and not fit for such a mission....
Yes, but the Library of Congress isn't a corporation. As I said, today's politicians won't create new public stuff -- only private stuff. I wouldn't have a problem with a digital deposit library in public hands, only one in private hands.
A deposit library isn't a digital entity though, and the library still must do considerable work to render their materials into a reproducible state. A digital deposit library... well, ever New Year's Day they'd be able to flip a switch and republish anything and everything for their profit, leaving their competitors trailing in their dust....
And why resort to insults? Why not just engage in an adult-like debate?
for no sane reason whatsoever you seem to have a problem with the idea of public domain works, works on which the copyright has expired, being used by companies.
You don't seem to get the point of public domain. it's not reserved for amatures and hobbyists. Everyone gets to use it.
Including big evil companies.
When your copyright expires it stops being yours. Evil corporations and hobbyists alike gets to use it whether you like it or not.
It no more has to be international than copyright terms have to be international and perfectly synchronised. which they're not.
For no sane reason whatsoever, you have missed the point. I'm not against the public domain, and I am personally working on a system that will (hopefully) allow me personally to derive profit from public domain works. What I'm against is giving a private body a monopoly on storing in-copyright works that means that they (and only they) will have a complete database of out-of-copyright works to exploit when copyright expires, whereas other companies will have to go out of their way to collect and pay for the works that they hope to reproduce with copyright expires. It's not just a matter of money, either, but opportunity. Even if you could buy a DVD film for a penny, who would want to store millions of DVDs for just so that they might have a chance to reproduce it somewhere down the line?
As long as it's a google-like free system then it doesn't screw the poor over any more than the rich.
A Google-like free system, you say? You mean one that's constantly mining your data in order to advertise to you more and more in multiple media, while riding roughshod over creators' rights right up until the point where they're sued, at which point they strike a deal which is to their best interests but leaves the content creator with 1% of sweet FA?
There's no such thing as a free lunch -- someone's going to have to pay, and right now world's governments are mostly beating the "small government" drum (and often doing so at the point of the richer countries' guns -- see also "Greece" and "Spain").
The system you propose would have to be international with international funding and international agreement -- operated by WIPO, perhaps. But the agreement would never come. The US and the UK would demand that it was truly "private sector", and the whole idea of a public service would slide down the chute of private interests.
An ultra-rich company would see it as a way to get an archive of all the world's creative material, and they'd have the world's biggest back catalogue to remaster and exploit when the original copyright expires. Other people wouldn't ever get to see the whole database.
Should we have laws to make stripping metadata illegal?
The solution to bad laws is not more bad laws.
Quite right: the answer is to pass some good laws, such as those that prohibit stripping ownership information from creative works. Now they may make a balls-up of the legislation (in fact they probably will), but as with many laws throughout history (but not so many these days), the underlying principle is (correctly) designed to serve the public good.
But as to the article, most of what people post on Facebook isn't copyrighted from the start. When you first create a work of art (writing, images, etc.) you have what is called a Manuscript Copyright. If you distribute the work, that inherent copyright vanishes.
Howdy, pard! When did you step out of your time machine? Cos the Berne Convention made it pretty clear that copyright requires neither registration nor notices, and is rather an automatic right granted to the creator of the work. The USA was a bit late in actually ratifying the treaty, and many claim that the current legislation is still in breach of Berne thanks to the prejudicial treatment of registered works in terms of damages, but still: technically, even the USA doesn't require registration.
That's why the law can't say "metadata is eternal", but must force a balanced, sensible definition of which metadata can be stripped. The GPS coordinates and the camera settings are irrelevant to copyright law -- they don't identify the author, after all -- so can be stripped. It's circulating a photo without identifying the author that creates accidental/incidental orphans....
Sometimes it's more important what it's a photo of. Not everthing can be replicated.
And that irreplicability is sometimes what's called "art". Your example's a fairly good one: the restoration of a cherished family portrait or similar. That's one of the reasons why orphaned work legislation is considered inevitable by many (see the summary). But making that orphan works law happen relies on some manner of preventing the accidental (or even malicious) orphaning of modern works that may be suitable for mass consumption (a picture of a nice sunrise, an amateur reportage shot from a warzone etc).
Which brings us back to the original point of this thread....
The law doesn't have to say "it's illegal to change metadata", just that it's illegal to remove copyright attributions that would result in an erroneous orphan work. Stripping metadata is like removing the name-tag from someone's jacket or computer so that it becomes lost property. You hand it in, and when the owner doesn't claim it within 3 months, it becomes your property. But if you hadn't removed the tag, it would have been easy to reunite it with its owner. Removing identifying marks is dishonest, and potentially fraudulent.
The BBC is one of the groups supporting "orphan works" legislation in the UK, but the BBC routinely strips meta-data from readers' contributions to the site. Contributors could claim that the BBC misled them, claiming they would retain ownership of their works, but then failed to take insufficient measures to protect the rights that they had promised their readers. That sounds like a lawsuit in the making....
You'd be inclined to think that if you've been using shitty workflows for 20yrs.
We all have been. Any changes are just hacked on top of legacy code and inherit all sorts of cruft and inconsistency.
Truth is, tablets have existed for about as long, and some of them were in many ways better than the ones on offer now. Still, they failed.
All the early tablets I worked with were just Windows 95s in tablet form -- there was no attempt to change the UI. As I said, modern UI changes aren't intrinsically linked to touchscreens, but the touchscreens have acted like a catalyst to make a major change.
The first really important factor is the fact that iOS was an almost entirely new platform and made no attempt to preserve backward compatibility with any existing OS, so people started coding from the ground up.
The second (and crucial) is that iOS started out on oocketable devices. If the iPad had been the first iOS product, people would have ported desktop apps without changing the UI paradigm. But people started by writing new, small apps, and a culture and UI ethos was established, and when the tablets came, they stuck to the design ethos established on the iPod, rather than reverting to the desktop model.
The new UI has now overcome inertia in a way no previous paradigm managed, and it's changing the computer completely.
Some of us have workflows even built into our daily lives, which cannot be accomplished with the limitations of a touch screen.
Most work still depends on being able to type text, one way or another, which a touchscreen alone is useless for.
Most work also depends on focusing your attention on something other than your computer display.
I keep stressing that the new workflow patterns are not just about touchscreens -- it's just that we needed some "mechanism" to overcome the inertia of the old ways.
All these "improved, modernised" workflows are just a waste of time for developers who need to write new code for stuff that will be used for a very limited time before being forgotten.
B*ll*cks. Our biggest problem to date has been legacy cruft caused by a failure to abstract out code and break the coupling between the UI and the back end. The modern workflows are the result of people designing and writing software from the ground up. Again, this is not something that's an intrinsic property of tablet computing, but it's a side-effect of it being something new and different, and the failure of the established names to port their apps early on and push their current desktop domination into the table market. We have new entrants coming to the market with apps that are not expected to maintain file or workflow compatibility with umpteen generations of Photoshop, AutoCAD etc, and that is a Very Good Thing.
It's not Windows though, but I guess you can figure out how to port it across somehow. Do people still use Windows?
If you can figure a way to port Windows to ARM, you're cleverer than Microsoft, who've only managed to write a shared abstraction layer for ARM and PC....
Slashdot Mirror
No, you only are required to give source code to those you distributed a binary too. That has been clear for a long time. For instance Red Hat exclusively gives source to paid enterprise customers, those customers aren't "supposed" to give that source code away to other parties depending on how the contract is written.
Any contract that overrides the "copyleft" nature of the GPL is in violation of the GPL, though, isn't it? So if Red Hat write out contracts that prohibit or restrict their clients' ability to redistribute the code, Red Hat lose the right to sell GPLed code....
Pretending to be Swedish seems to have helped cover their arses when it came to clients in other countries. But as the name's soon to be confined to the history books, I doubt it matters....
A pre-existing game is an enormous black-box, and you're thrusting kids into a whole world of complexity. You need to be really motivated by the end-goal to push through that. You were, most aren't. I remember trying to motivate myself to learn Quake modding. I failed. It was, in the end, simply too complex, and I couldn't work on that level of abstraction. Starting simple means starting without games.
The "way of connecting a game control to a phone" is called Bluetooth. Your phone has is.
The HDMI thing isn't a "bonus" -- it's a feature of your phone. And if it's not a feature of your phone, this device isn't going to magically give you it.
This is "stone soup" sales tactics. Sell you something "magic" that lets you do wonderful things... because you don't know you can already do them....
And my answer is "I'll trade in my desk phone for a softphone if the IT helpdesk promise not to ask me to turn my PC off and back on again when I call up for assistance." ;-)
IMO games are the key. I know I learned most of what I know because of games.
I disagree, but that's not to say I agree with the philosophy of the Coderdojo guys. The problem with games as motivation is that it is an attempt to motivate by topic rather than process.
Learning is an inherently rewarding process -- it is a pure form of mental stimulation. If the teaching is effective, it generates flow and the process becomes self-motivating... but to achieve this the process needs to have a low cognitive load and each step must be inherently meaningful.
Games, however, are complex beasts, and in order to teach with games you have to take a lot of shortcuts and provide a lot of "black-box" code that the beginning programmer can't and won't understand, which means the learning experience isn't entirely meaningful. There's really nothing more frustrating than achieving a result under instruction but not really knowing why it's working. You haven't learned the system. Worse -- those black-boxes can be munged up with lots of "simplifications" that not only obscure the code logic, but also reduce the human logic in the system (eg gamemaker, where increasing the score is done by adding a "setscore" event and ticking a little box marked "relative").
Learning programming has to start with learning how to overcome simple problems and slowly upping the complexity -- starting a course on programming with games is like taking someone who has done no maths and no physics and trying to teach them structural engineering.
Another example of bad teaching practice is that old favourite of programming books: "Hello world." Why do we start with a piece of code that doesn't actually do anything? In C, it's particularly bad. When I started learning C at uni, we were compiling and running from a Unix command prompt (or possibly Linux. In second year CS it was definitely Linux, although we were using Solaris in AI.) What would have been more meaningful than writing simple programs that carried out specific mathematical functions as an extension to the BASH command set? Instantly meaningful nd useful. Instead, we were struggling with C's esoteric consol IO functions for weeks in order to be at the stage where we could even start to do anything meaningful.
Whereas we could have been writing nth root programs and typing nthroot 1024 9 and getting the answer 2 within a day or two.
All subjects are easier to learn when every step is meaningful -- games offer no easy path to meaningfulness.
It didn't say anything about curriculum though. It's a great idea - and I'd like to do it, but how? Does it really define that? It's a great idea to teach kinder-gardeners calculus, but you'd have to provide some more specifics on how you intend on doing this for it to make sense to me...
7
"Oh no, you don't want a curriculum! A curriculum would stifle creativity!"
So what do I do then?
"Use your judgement as a teacher!"
OK, but I'm not really a teacher yet -- you're supposed to be showing me how to become a teacher.
"Ah, but I am. The first lesson is that there are no rules, only experience."
Ah, I see. So what have I paid you over a grand for if you can't teach me anything?
"My experience."
Right. Your experience. But you won't tell me what your experience is.
"Exactly. Because every teacher is unique and you have to experience the classroom for yourself to find out what sort of teacher you are."
Can I have my money back then?
"Oh no, because now I've taught you how to be a teacher."
Not strictly a real conversation, but that's how I felt after taking a course in teaching English as a foreign language (and it was a Cambridge-accredited CELTA course, too).
This is the reality of the "liberal" school of pedagogical thought -- there are no rules, only creativity. The problem is that the people who found all the "liberal" methods develop a way of working that is very effective, but are not strictly aware of what they are doing and can't identify the effective core of their method to teach it. They believe they're working without structure and without directing the students, but they have a strong internal structure that they follow and they direct the learners subtly and subconsciously. In the end they often advise strategies that are diametrically opposed to what they actually do. People who try to follow their advice end up either end up misinterpreting it and getting lost, or (worse) following it literally and buggering up the children's education....
Anyone, anywhere who uses a headset to make phone calls looks like an utter twat.
Appearance is subjective. If someone using appropriate equipment for the task looks like an utter twat, you may want to reconsider your outlook on life. Would you criticise a mechanic for using an uncool socket set? Would you tell a motorcyclist he looks like a twat for wearing a safety helmet? Or maybe car seats are for weanies and we should all drive standing up?
We await your wisdom, oh mighty Tehcyder!
Yes, but most companies using VOIP have a bridge and virtual exchange to connect it to the phone network, so as to use it as a soft replacement for the dedicated phone.
I don't think it's "much of Europe", but rather "many companies in Europe", because in my experience, it's all a matter of accounting practices and the "cost culture" of your employer. For years I was without a work mobile, because mobile telephony had been designated a "project expense", whereas every desk had a phone anyway. Most projects were short term and couldn't justify the cost/hassle of a mobile phone, when there was a free alternative. The company also made it difficult to move your number when you moved desk. Useful in that it stopped you getting chased down by clients you were no longer working for, but a right bugger if you wanted to give someone a way to get in touch with you. Official policy was to give out the number for office reception and get transferred.
This particular employer was too stingy to switch wholesale to an internal IP network, which meant "follow-me" numbers were not an option. Although it was always the plan, and with every office refit, they fitted natty Cisco IP phones. But didn't actually use any of their useful features because we couldn't go IP-telephony until every office was properly kitted out. I left the company almost two years ago, and despite many thousands of pounds spent on IP telephony, we still didn't have the "follow-me" numbers implemented anywhere except the call-centre in Wales. But even before I left, mobile phones had finally become standard issue (for new staff only, though(!)) and company policy encouraged usage of MS Messenger internally, so I doubt they'll ever use the full IP telephony. All it ever achieved was buggering up our internet connection... because facilities specced the pipe bandwidth on data requirements, but BT tended to rig up the connection to take the voice bandwidth off the same pipe.
Lovely, fancy, expensive phones that meant we got a vastly inferior service to what we got off the old £10-a-pop BT phones. Progress....
Quite. Anyone who would volunteer to spend 2 years with only 3 other people, and the next 2 with only 7 other people, is clearly a sociopath and not fit for such a mission....
Yes, but the Library of Congress isn't a corporation. As I said, today's politicians won't create new public stuff -- only private stuff. I wouldn't have a problem with a digital deposit library in public hands, only one in private hands.
Seconded. A dent is a "ding". A "bing" is a wasp's nest.
A deposit library isn't a digital entity though, and the library still must do considerable work to render their materials into a reproducible state. A digital deposit library... well, ever New Year's Day they'd be able to flip a switch and republish anything and everything for their profit, leaving their competitors trailing in their dust....
And why resort to insults? Why not just engage in an adult-like debate?
for no sane reason whatsoever you seem to have a problem with the idea of public domain works, works on which the copyright has expired, being used by companies. You don't seem to get the point of public domain. it's not reserved for amatures and hobbyists. Everyone gets to use it. Including big evil companies.
When your copyright expires it stops being yours. Evil corporations and hobbyists alike gets to use it whether you like it or not.
It no more has to be international than copyright terms have to be international and perfectly synchronised. which they're not.
For no sane reason whatsoever, you have missed the point. I'm not against the public domain, and I am personally working on a system that will (hopefully) allow me personally to derive profit from public domain works. What I'm against is giving a private body a monopoly on storing in-copyright works that means that they (and only they) will have a complete database of out-of-copyright works to exploit when copyright expires, whereas other companies will have to go out of their way to collect and pay for the works that they hope to reproduce with copyright expires. It's not just a matter of money, either, but opportunity. Even if you could buy a DVD film for a penny, who would want to store millions of DVDs for just so that they might have a chance to reproduce it somewhere down the line?
As long as it's a google-like free system then it doesn't screw the poor over any more than the rich.
A Google-like free system, you say? You mean one that's constantly mining your data in order to advertise to you more and more in multiple media, while riding roughshod over creators' rights right up until the point where they're sued, at which point they strike a deal which is to their best interests but leaves the content creator with 1% of sweet FA?
There's no such thing as a free lunch -- someone's going to have to pay, and right now world's governments are mostly beating the "small government" drum (and often doing so at the point of the richer countries' guns -- see also "Greece" and "Spain").
The system you propose would have to be international with international funding and international agreement -- operated by WIPO, perhaps. But the agreement would never come. The US and the UK would demand that it was truly "private sector", and the whole idea of a public service would slide down the chute of private interests.
An ultra-rich company would see it as a way to get an archive of all the world's creative material, and they'd have the world's biggest back catalogue to remaster and exploit when the original copyright expires. Other people wouldn't ever get to see the whole database.
Also, 'internet photos' aren't a particularly big concern in the orphan works debate.
Perhaps not, but they are the main point of this particular debate on stripping metadata!!!!
Should we have laws to make stripping metadata illegal?
The solution to bad laws is not more bad laws.
Quite right: the answer is to pass some good laws, such as those that prohibit stripping ownership information from creative works. Now they may make a balls-up of the legislation (in fact they probably will), but as with many laws throughout history (but not so many these days), the underlying principle is (correctly) designed to serve the public good.
But as to the article, most of what people post on Facebook isn't copyrighted from the start. When you first create a work of art (writing, images, etc.) you have what is called a Manuscript Copyright. If you distribute the work, that inherent copyright vanishes.
Howdy, pard! When did you step out of your time machine? Cos the Berne Convention made it pretty clear that copyright requires neither registration nor notices, and is rather an automatic right granted to the creator of the work. The USA was a bit late in actually ratifying the treaty, and many claim that the current legislation is still in breach of Berne thanks to the prejudicial treatment of registered works in terms of damages, but still: technically, even the USA doesn't require registration.
If it makes you feel better, I can pick you up on your misspelling of the word "grammar".... ;-)
That's why the law can't say "metadata is eternal", but must force a balanced, sensible definition of which metadata can be stripped. The GPS coordinates and the camera settings are irrelevant to copyright law -- they don't identify the author, after all -- so can be stripped. It's circulating a photo without identifying the author that creates accidental/incidental orphans....
Sometimes it's more important what it's a photo of. Not everthing can be replicated.
And that irreplicability is sometimes what's called "art". Your example's a fairly good one: the restoration of a cherished family portrait or similar. That's one of the reasons why orphaned work legislation is considered inevitable by many (see the summary). But making that orphan works law happen relies on some manner of preventing the accidental (or even malicious) orphaning of modern works that may be suitable for mass consumption (a picture of a nice sunrise, an amateur reportage shot from a warzone etc).
Which brings us back to the original point of this thread....
The law doesn't have to say "it's illegal to change metadata", just that it's illegal to remove copyright attributions that would result in an erroneous orphan work. Stripping metadata is like removing the name-tag from someone's jacket or computer so that it becomes lost property. You hand it in, and when the owner doesn't claim it within 3 months, it becomes your property. But if you hadn't removed the tag, it would have been easy to reunite it with its owner. Removing identifying marks is dishonest, and potentially fraudulent.
The BBC is one of the groups supporting "orphan works" legislation in the UK, but the BBC routinely strips meta-data from readers' contributions to the site. Contributors could claim that the BBC misled them, claiming they would retain ownership of their works, but then failed to take insufficient measures to protect the rights that they had promised their readers. That sounds like a lawsuit in the making....
You'd be inclined to think that if you've been using shitty workflows for 20yrs.
We all have been. Any changes are just hacked on top of legacy code and inherit all sorts of cruft and inconsistency.
Truth is, tablets have existed for about as long, and some of them were in many ways better than the ones on offer now. Still, they failed.
All the early tablets I worked with were just Windows 95s in tablet form -- there was no attempt to change the UI. As I said, modern UI changes aren't intrinsically linked to touchscreens, but the touchscreens have acted like a catalyst to make a major change.
The first really important factor is the fact that iOS was an almost entirely new platform and made no attempt to preserve backward compatibility with any existing OS, so people started coding from the ground up.
The second (and crucial) is that iOS started out on oocketable devices. If the iPad had been the first iOS product, people would have ported desktop apps without changing the UI paradigm. But people started by writing new, small apps, and a culture and UI ethos was established, and when the tablets came, they stuck to the design ethos established on the iPod, rather than reverting to the desktop model.
The new UI has now overcome inertia in a way no previous paradigm managed, and it's changing the computer completely.
Some of us have workflows even built into our daily lives, which cannot be accomplished with the limitations of a touch screen. Most work still depends on being able to type text, one way or another, which a touchscreen alone is useless for. Most work also depends on focusing your attention on something other than your computer display.
I keep stressing that the new workflow patterns are not just about touchscreens -- it's just that we needed some "mechanism" to overcome the inertia of the old ways.
All these "improved, modernised" workflows are just a waste of time for developers who need to write new code for stuff that will be used for a very limited time before being forgotten.
B*ll*cks. Our biggest problem to date has been legacy cruft caused by a failure to abstract out code and break the coupling between the UI and the back end. The modern workflows are the result of people designing and writing software from the ground up. Again, this is not something that's an intrinsic property of tablet computing, but it's a side-effect of it being something new and different, and the failure of the established names to port their apps early on and push their current desktop domination into the table market. We have new entrants coming to the market with apps that are not expected to maintain file or workflow compatibility with umpteen generations of Photoshop, AutoCAD etc, and that is a Very Good Thing.
It's not Windows though, but I guess you can figure out how to port it across somehow. Do people still use Windows?
If you can figure a way to port Windows to ARM, you're cleverer than Microsoft, who've only managed to write a shared abstraction layer for ARM and PC....