That is some good leverage to drill through some of the wood presented by the obtuse commenters on this article.
You can say Wave is "realtime email", "conversational wiki", "IM that can build documents", "Office Suite with Version Control", or "Collaborative Content Management System".
Doing this improperly leverages things people already understand, but in a pretty systematic way people can be flatlanded beyond if necessary.
For example:
An automobile is "horseless carriage"
Email is like postal mail, but somehow electronic in nature.
Instant Messaging is like a phone call, but with text and always over the internet.
An Office Productivity Suite is pen-and-paperless pen and paper.
A Wiki is a collaborative CMS where you let raw edits act as check and balance over raw edits.
In turn, a CMS is a webpage who's content can be managed via a form on another webpage.
And finally, a webpage is like a magazine insert delivered over computer networks.
Every one of these descriptions leverages previously familiar comparisons and is technically accurate.
Each one is also left somewhat lackluster to the uninitiated, due to unfamiliarity with how the advantages of the new format are leveraged to significantly alter the underlying expectations of the medium.
Email is like Snail mail, but you simply do not use it the same way. It changes the very method by which you work due to it's instant and electronic nature, and the added features this new environment allows both enhances and alters the stale practice of delivering textual missives dramatically.
A car gets passengers and goods from point A to B much like a horse-drawn carriage, but it's maintenance and upkeep are significantly different. Given roads, it's top and sustainable speeds are much faster. Given assembly line production, it's initial and total cost of ownership are magnitudes cheaper. These added benefits are both subtle enough to not be guessed by the uninitiated, and comprise "killer" application at the same time.
So to with Wave. The theory behind it is that it allows you to reap all the rewards of Email, Mailing lists, Usenet, IM, Wiki, CMS, comment threads, collaborative Document Creation with version control, and whiteboarding (among many other standalone apps) in one seamless application: replacing all of these disparate functions with one single, well crafted function that happens to accomplish all of their goals, and without increasing the complication for the user to tap into any subset of these features whatsoever (including, but not limited to each of the boring old models actually listed).
It allows conversations to be treated just like we do email, save that annoying comment quotes are entirely obviated by direct in-post replies. Replies are realtime, so you are never required to switch gears into a separate IM environment for that interactive benefit. Other's content is editable, and changes are traceable and accountable so "fixed that for you" becomes actually fixing that for them. Multiple people fixing the same thing is (allegedly) handled with greater conflict management than any present Wiki or Version Control system presently extant.
If product discussed in a conversation happens to be a document, then a Wave discussing the document inexorably evolves into actually writing the document in situ. Seriously, you don't even plan for it; the document crystallizes in front of you while you collaboratively imagine it so trying to export it elsewhere always presents as a wasteful excersize. If said document needs to be printed and collated, you hit the print button or export to ODF, PDF or DOC. If said document needs to be text on a web page, you hit the "embed" button and your continuing work to refine the final document in the wave (minus chatter, optionally with editorially controlled release cycles) is made transparently visible to the public wherever you've put the embed with no further intervention of server-side sof
My concern with Google being a monopoly is that monoculture harms whatever ecosystem it belongs to. Even if Google were to take great pains and bend over backwards to be a benevolent monopoly, it would still leave the industry 2 mistakes and a corrupt action from disaster.
I subscribe to the maxim that Honest People (or corporations) ought to be kept Honest by policy. It is a Good Thing for any person or organization to be trustworthy, to work to prove their reputation and to earn accolades. Nonetheless, it is always preferable to protect oneself by policy from whatever entities one can afford to, trustworthy or not. You should always value trustworthiness in third parties with which you transact, however actually relying on that trust should always be your last resort and ideally the result of a degenerate condition (for example: getting started, emergent events). Put another way, you should always reduce the surface area of your vulnerability, so that it does not take herculean amount of trust in others to patch over said vulnerability. To that end, organizations actually maximize profit by submitting to and encouraging such precaution of their client base.
To give an auto example (srsly, can't slashdot provide a CSS class or tag for these, already?;D) you buckle up even if you know the car is being driven by a skilled and cautious expert. By our correct cultural convention, this habit does not impune the driver's skills, and to be honest any driver would be ethically remiss (fine liability notwithstanding) to start the car without insisting you first buckle up.
With this in mind, Google is completely missing many opportunities to protect other participants in it's industries from itself. From a Game Theory perspective, Google can avoid a classic monopolistic Nash Equilibrium in order to optimize profit better than it's current strategy will allow it by acting in a well thought out, systematic way to defeat it's very own stranglehold on affected industries.
For example, openly releasing the code for new products is important to prevent Google's own service provisions from being baked into the very fabric of new industries it spawns, which would mortally taint them. Google choosing not to be the only Wave server in town is vital for the acceptance of Wave as a platform. However, they do not seem to subscribe to this wisdom in some of their most vital industries. They wish all users to embrace cloud computing, but then do not open source their own cloud computing infrastructure. I'm sorry, but if I am not allowed to breathe this benfit into the big iron at my own corporate NOC first then I'll end up staying away from closed cloud computing solutions for as long as possible and when I do relent, I may lock myself into a platform Google's goods fail to interoperate with. This outcome is lose-lose, but only the cloud providers can take action to puncture this barrier to entry. Furthermore, the first one to do so wins an influential de facto standard. Also, losing a percentage of marketshare to self-starters may be quickly outweighed if your action also engorges the market so that your smaller "cut" is larger than the entire market would have otherwise been.
This holds not only for server app source code, but for trade secrets as well. Google is in such an over-powerful position in many of it's industries that it would economically benefit from releasing part (not all!) of it's portfolio of trade secrets on matters like search and advertising specifically to allow it's competitors to enrich themselves. This should be done just enough to diffuse the common argument "Man! I hate that Google does X, but there is no other reasonably effective search in town". Whenever your customers are not allowed to vote with their feet, your own innovation and by extension the very health of your industry decays.
A competent client should not introduce too much delay due to crypto, and if that's such a problem then simply batch the deltas a bit less frequently. For real, if the other end of the conversation is delayed for up to 1-2 seconds, will that kill the interactivity? I recall getting many impressive bits of chat done on 300 baud modems back in the day, and I would gladly go back to that latency level if it were needed in the name of crypto and real security. After all, anything is better than the present state of the art by way of line-based or post-based updates.
The other thing to consider is that realtime text is already encrypted quite comfortably in protocols such as SSH, where latency would delay your interaction with a perfectly reflective command line shell instead of an air-headed co-worker who is probably too busy guzzling venti latte to even notice you've typed, let alone respond within minutes.
That being said, FFS offer end to end security.. and then the next big point is unintentional data disclosure. It sounds like they will fix that to cover their own asses, so mark that as a win.
Srsly though, entertainment requires creativity in one form or another to be instantiated. Information does not require it (though many paid content providers try to slather it on), information only requires access to raw empirical data. If I'm too poor to have someone sing and dance the data for me, then I'll simply collate it myself, thank you.
hmm, free newspapers as fishwrap almost sound like a good idea, but I honestly do stick with the paper towels. Not a waste, but orders of magnitude cheaper than NYT D:
if they do publish something factual you'd want to verify it anyway.
Naturally, but you can pay for the second opinion too, can't you? What every producer knows is that Joe Citizen has as much disposable income as they do.
I think that is pretty much the intent of Diller's rant. He is attempting to chastise all digital consumers in one swoop for failing to pay for his clients' content and preferring free alternatives.
Strangely enough, nobody will stop his clients from charging their customers. We'll just stop being customers and take our <$0.01 business elsewhere. There is no content in "The New York Times" that I feel worth investing 15% the cost of my entire internet pipe just to see. In contrast I do pay $10/yr for Wired magazine, and they actually bundle that up in paper with pretty graphics and drop it on my doorstep. Yeah, apparently even if every story in Wired were online first and for free, I'd still pay for their rag just so I don't have to bring a laptop into the bathroom with me. Since the content can be had online for free (and earlier, is it?) but I'm not drawing it there, this demonstrates that I am not paying for the canned content but for it's delivery.
Now if I wanted to kill thousands of trees and blow $50/mo for more than one man is ever going to read, then I could get NYT's bathroom delivery feature as well. But, two magazines per month is about all the data I consume in that niche, and current political minutiae interest me less than technological innovation. So even if the comparison were fair, Wired would win in the battle over the audience of "me".
When I'm out of the bathroom, I aggregate dozens of blogs. They don't cost me anything and the trees get to live. I'm neither subscribing to nor paying attention to what misinformation embedded reporters in iraq are being paid or fooled into feeding me, nor the spin some editor wants to place on a story about some bill in congress. I draw my data from enough varied sources to correct spins and slants by sheer volume. NYT needs to rethink not only it's revenue model but it's content model. Just like AOL which fell before it, NYT must stop trying to do the thinking for it's users and charging them for the privilege. Cut the fat, and focus on obtaining revenue for and delivering what can't be had elsewhere (perhaps investigative journalism) and drop expenses for which free alternatives abound (AP feed, endless op-ed). What are they seriously doing with all this money they charge us and the advertisers anyhow?
Not necessarily true. Consider this possibility:... Two types of ISPs remain: those that carry big media and those that carry indy media.
Gads, you are right! Such an eventuality would be sobering indeed. The Big Media fast lane, with instant access to high definition content, would have to be easy to navigate however. Maybe instead of web addresses, content could be indexed by simple numbers. Then the American Idle (I do like that term;D) could consume the content by wielding a control device (instead of a keyboard and mouse) that does little more than change feeds to the next "channel" as it were.
Having such a content juggernaut fed by the gamut of Big Media would certainly make a person think twice before selecting a more complicated, open platform where all you could access are no-account indie content such as My Bank's Website, My Local Realtor's Listings, and Email From My Boss.
If they were happy with the quality of casual snapshots, they wouldn't be complaining about what is on Wikipedia now.
I don't know if the "quality of a casual snapshot" is the issue as much as "the quality of a casual snapshot taken by someone the star was trying hard not to be seen by".
Something as simple as the publicist's lacky hefting a mid-range, 10mpx digital camera in a well lit corner of the office with the star dressed well and in make up, and if it still needs to be touched up get some photoshop nerd at the office to do it. You have basic presentation and a model who is focusing on looking good for the shot for less than $1k of everyone's time so you don't need to drop 100k on a studio and who know how many times that to bicker over the rights. This will get you a much better shot than the grainy, pockmarked image you complain about on wikipedia on the cheap.
Then is $1k too much for publicity? How else do you defend the ROI of your beamer, sir?
In truth none of it has to do with favorable representation or compensation for photography. It simply has to do with certain publicists hoping to pressure the wikimedia foundation into granting them ownership over a small corner of the encyclopedia. If WM caves, it means they would have to seek permission to republish the encylopedia in different forms.. to provide copies in developing countries.. freeze copies to CD, and that's when the gouging would begin. It also means all the about.com's of the world could no longer freely copy from or expand upon content from WM without picking out the grisle.
So yeah, it's largely an example of why and how copyright in general is absurd. Applying copyright to a work devalues it to others, and makes them seek alternatives even if they have lower objective quality. It debases your work. Sure, you put a restrictive license on your gratuitously expensive photograph which means you get to drag random people into court in the future if you become displeased by the manner in which they come to use it. What good does that do you when we'll all simply obtain creative commons or public domain photographs whose use cannot threaten to harm us? Or, if you've made certain none exist, we just won't represent your precious star. I'm sure there is someone, somewhere willing to take the risk that people will figure out what they look like, even if it means that there is no legal recourse when someone publishes a copy with a mustache painted on.
Put simply: represent yourself, and your clients, to the world in a manner we can envelope without danger to ourselves, or else we'll be forced to do the representing for you (as we have done). We would love as much as you for your star's picture to be pretty and shiny, but we're not stupid enough to sign our soul to you for the privilege.
such as assuming that nobody will ever guess that putting in a password of "&aR4q=Xj9_n½" will give them administrator access.
I would have edited in a password like "12345", but I had to enclose it in "strong" tags so that felt kind of cheap.
"Security through obscurity" means that lack of information is the only thing keeping something secure
yeah, kind of like lacking my username and password is one of the few practical things keeping you from using my online identity, and lacking my credit card number keeps you from running me into debt. Things like that.;3
I installed Win7 on a machine previously running Win2000; kept old HD just in case.
Used it. Liked it. Stable, did not appear a bit slower than Win2k on my 2.7Ghz single core with 1GB ram. Improved user friendliness by way of Simple English controls. I can see the benefit there for novice users, and experts after a brain-fizzling day at work alike.
BUT
I still rolled right on back to Win2k after a week's worth of testing.
Why roll back if there was zero faults I could find?
It doesn't do anything new.
It's as shiny as all get out, but I don't care much for my OS being shiny.
It could have "an improved network stack", but is not capable of any new network features. For example, I can't set DHCP alongside static IP's on a single interface. I've been waiting for someone to offer that now for 15 years.
It might be "more secure".. and to be honest, I was quite impressed by the user accounts management and program install policies.. but my natted Win2K box with my usage policies has stood the test of time and requires no extra security.
So, beyond the superficial there is really no advantage to the upgrade for me. Now, list the disadvantages to upgrading an existing install:
* buy OS, yet again (or figure out how to pirate it and worry about keeping on the upgrade path and avoid kill switches)
* reinstall all the software, some of which needs to either be rebought or repirated. Reconfigure all the settings. In short, every time you find something that doesn't work like before, you have to stop to tweak with it. After a week, I still couldn't get a thing done without tripping all over things that needed configurational TLC.
Now reconfig will happen whenever you start anew, which is inevitable as the machine will eventually die. However, this machine won't die any later after installing the new OS and going through a gratuitous reconfig step. In short, no pros and some cons. Verdict, not happening.
So, congrats M$ on distracting us all with how terrible Vista was for long enough to sink our expectations and try to make us say nice things about Win7 being relatively better. I admit it is marginally better and marginally more resource conservative than XP. On a new machine, Win7 > XP. But you'll still never get our old machines, because Win7 is not a DECADE more advanced than XP, as it really ought to be.
It's time someone changed the GOD DAMNED PARADIGM. The entire OS abstraction that most of the world relies upon today is outdated. I welcome ChromeOS now, not because I am concerned many people will use it, but I hope it will gadfly M$, Apple, AND the OSS community into doing an operating system properly for a change.
I can't say what a truly superior, worth-trying paradigm will look like.. but I have some small recommendations:
* scrap the directory-based filesystem. Tag files, and make it easy to use tags like directories.
* Once you've perfected ACLs for the new filesystem, use something very similar on the network stack. Relying on third party firewall apps to track application to network bindings indicates the present approach is too loose in this regard.
* Jail every app by default. Give them all hooks to the same kernel, but no access to the same filesystem, network infrastructure, or message loop by default. App jails should have similar separation to user accounts. Apps put windows on the same screen for a user, but cannot "see" one another by default. Apps can be granted shared access, IPC conduits, or access to broad resources (screenshot utilities, VNC clients etc) but should not have such privileges by default. Approaching things in this direction ought to obviate 99% of the local security concerns most people are bothered about, and the ones Win7 tries so valiantly to defend you against. EG, why shit bricks about every piece of software that gets installed when many of them do not require the broad power current OS's afford them? Keep honest applications honest and nip the prob
Google is a business that runs on Linux, but when they decided to develop a web browser, the chief developers were Windows-only guys who admitted they knew nothing about developing portable code, or developing on Linux.
No, I think it's more fair to say that Google is a business who's servers run on Linux CLI, but they use Macintosh primarily and Windows secondarily as their workstations. Yes, I am lacking a citation there.. I can't easily find one in a quick search either way, but I get my data from the only Google employee I've ever chatted with, corroborated by the Google story on 60 minutes showing exclusively OSX workstations.
Given that, if they use Mac for their desktop (and sink money into that vertical hardware stack) instead of reveling in all of the power and TCO of Gnu/Linux/X11, there must be a disincentive. If the (allegedly) smartest CS minds on the planet can't be bothered to compile their own kernel, why should I?
The network transparency costs practically nothing when running local apps (it uses shared memory)
Using shared memory in order to pretend you are talking across a network when you are not, compared to not wasting any time or resources on the irrelevant, is a real and a significant cost. X11 fanboys are allergic to KISS.
Right now I am sitting in front of a machine that has windows from applications running on four different machines
I... have to ask why, of course. If you can run an app from machine Q and have the bandwidth to put the window on your local machine, what on earth are you doing that you couldn't just run the app on your local machine? Are you trying to control resources at remote locations or something? Is this effort so vital to the core principals of your OS that every window has to pretend to be doing this and burn (cheap, but still exhaustible) resources just to pretend to be behaving this way all the time?
unless you happen to know which applications are running where, you'd think they were all local apps.
Well, that throws your "from any OS, to any OS" argument out the window. I've used Cygwin to test running an X.. um.. client? server? on my Windows machine so I could launch apps hosted on a Debian machine in the past. I could certainly tell which windows were which. The GUI elements were different, the clipboard did not transfer over, and the save/open dialog boxes showed me the foreign drive arrangements. Quite vertigo inducing really, so I never made that mess part of a complete breakfast.
Just because you don't happen to use it doesn't mean there aren't a great many people who do use it regularly.
I am sorry to have offended all twelve of you then by suggesting that MY personal CPU has better things to do than wasting millions of it's 1.6 billion cycles per second on the off chance I might start doing what you do. X11's inefficiencies make memory-resident quick starters look like child's play.:P
The worst idea I am personally aware of is the assumption that just because "everyone" seems to agree on a particular point, that it means that the point must be right.
Specifically, false consensus is a dangerous beast. Do not rely upon it.
The loudest and most powerful developers all swear by X, therefor all influential Linux distros and popular Linux Apps rely solely upon that monoculture.
How do the users feel about X? I can't say for certain; they don't even know what X is. All I can say is that they definitely aren't using it. They massively choose Windows or Macintosh instead. Tellingly, it is much simpler to get users to download, install, and use free Firefox on Windows or even Mac than it is to get them to download, install and use a free OS.
I cannot say that I trust Google's privacy choices either, but they seem to recognize that most people want to get to their Email quickly and that most of the user interaction and effort required by modern OSen is a distraction from actually getting their job done.
Now, we'll just have to wait and see how well they can deliver upon their core promises. I don't know, perhaps it will fail to meet it's goals. Bitching that X isn't one of it's goals sounds disingenuous to me, however. I am reminded of Ron Paul supporters flaming me for choosing not to vote. Nobody owes your software product any patronage, people can use or develop whatever they would like. If you want Google using X, maybe stop flaming them and name calling on the one hand, and on the other hand put forth some effort to demonstrate that X (or whatever you are trying to sell them on) will actually meet their needs. They do not appear to believe that is true and you don't seem to want them on board anyway, so do us all a favor and STFU.
But...... they can't get Chromium to run right on X. Solution? To much fanfare, replace X.
If they do replace X, and their replacement is a modular FOSS software project, I would love to see it made available in other distrobutions to compete with X.
You can moan about "X haters" all that you want, but if you do not wish to have competition it implies that you know your project is inferior.
And oh, anyone else notice the irony that the Chrome _browser_ for Linux seems largely like an afterthought right now? Still, way to go, Google.
I don't see this as an irony. I see this as an: "Damn! It's hard to make Chrome work on GNU/X11/Linux! WTF? *research*research*research*... wow, you know it will be easier to replace X11 than it will be to port Chromium into it. D:
Sure, there are other goals being met here: "yay we make an OS nao!"// "yay, our OS has an excuse to initially be incompatible with applications which do not display our ads!" But as for myself, it's all about "Yay! die X11 you bastard, die a painful death!;D" and "Yay! More commercial investment in FOSS OSen to weaken the Windows monopoleh!"
It's meaningless to call something a Linux distribution unless it at least provides enough of the userspace stuff (glibc, pthreads, X, etc, etc) that you have a hope in hell of running a Linux app on it.
I, for one, am happy calling a "Linux distribution" any distribution of software which provides a user interface backed by a linux kernel. What you are describing, one would assume would be a "Gnu/Xorg/Pthreads/Linux/I-wanna-run-my-XYZ-software" distribution.
Otherwise, your semantic complaint sounds equivalent to MS-fanboys popular battle cry "It's not really an OS unless it runs all of my Windows apps and games." I am not the only person who is interested to see X's dominance in the FOSS GUI ecosystem get challenged. X is bloated and old.
Over the past decade, I have tried numerous linux distros (Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, et al) with numerous window managers (Gnome, KDE, XDM) on the same hardware as M$ counterparts (Win 98/2000/XP/7RC). On a new install or after video hardware upgrade, the X options always leave me needing to edit xorg.conf either from the CLI or from an eyeball bleeding 60Hz video mode on CRT's. Also, I have never seen a single GUI element.. from a window to a menu to a button to the cursor itself.. render any faster, smoother, or more reliably in X than it does in Windoze. (XDM ties at drawing empty boxes as fast as Win7 Aero can swoop blurry, frosted glass onto the screen. I do not count this as a win.)
Now let's add Android and MacOS/Quartz into the comparison. On comparable hardware to a windows machine, these Linux based, X-liberated offerings provide an even smoother and more responsive user interface experience than Windows.
I would like to point out that Linux GUI distributions have negligible desktop marketshare today. I would like to point out that M$ has tried like gangbusters to surrender it's marketshare wholesale to Linux by bullying it's customers into the non-option of Vista (most of whom can not afford to burn dough on a Mac) for THREE YEARS STRAIGHT now. I submit that X's inferior performance is a big reason for this failure to launch.. combined with the proprietary windows hardware drivers problem, and the FOSS developers disincentive for refugee lusers sullying their sacred OSen.
Now, Google is claiming to back a project which might get lusers off of Windows, and into a snappy OS based on Linux, but with none but corner case support headaches for FOSS developers. As long as Google can crunch the driver problem (which, would we not all benefit from that?) I am significantly confused why so many people are butthurt over X being passed up here.
Hello MobyDisk, here is a level headed response if I have ever seen one. Please accept my apologies if my previous post came off as pretentious or caustic at all.
I concede to your point that law does not always require a perfectly obvious trail through which to draw a boundary (such as what constitutes copying and what does not) in order to be applicable. However what I was hoping to illustrate was that globally available perfect-fidelity (digital) data transfer honestly demolishes the foundational assumptions of copyright, such that the perceived rights of the producers and consumers can no longer be simultaneously honored by this model.
The key to the change is the act of commoditization. A physical book or sheet of music can be treated as a commodity. The producer can spend money creating copies, and consumers can purchase and then optionally resell these physical copies. If the information inherent to these copies (text of the book, notes of the song) are reprinted by a rival who seeks to dodge the creative cost to undersell at retail, then the law can punish the rival who must invest, therefor recoup marginal costs to create their copies and therefor has difficulty remaining below the radar.
In a world where information is expensive to broadcast or to transmit from one location to another, this was relied upon as an economic bandaid and acted as a subsidy for creative effort. The US constitution initially provided a limited timeframe for this copyright protection, so that the fruits of this subsidized creativity would pass into the public domain to enrich the pool of available ideas from which new creative minds could draw.
The initial purpose of Copyright was to subsidize a wellspring of creativity in order to enrich the public domain, much like scientific grants are meant to subsidize research which is then made public for the benefit of all. The twentieth century has seen copyright provide an overbalance of power to content producers, who have then perverted the law to cover virtually all creative works in a clever form of perpetuity.
These wrongs must not only be rectified, but the underlying market landscape has changed sufficiently to obviate copyright entirely. Today, even short copyright terms are detrimental compared to the benefits of outright abolition, since there is no longer significant cost in distributing canned creative work, and non-canned work.. custom work, online services, in-house development.. have no need of copyright protection.
We now live in a world where information rarely needs a medium more tangible than a binary representation, which can in turn be transmitted between virtually any pair of willing parties spanning the globe with insignificant marginal cost. Furthermore, burning physical optical media and even printing books have plummeted to nearly as cheap levels.
As a result, any consumer of digital media can choose to redistribute the data they have purchased to any willing parties in the world almost instantly. The cost of doing so is so low that no recoup is needed, most individuals who choose this (presently illegal) path do so for no more profit than peer recognition and tit for tat.
Digitally encoded copies of information, as opposed to physically bound copies, are not and can not be treated as commodities. By their very definition they are not scarce whereas physical commodities are. One can complain about the existence of a "counterfeit" book devaluing yours, of counterfeit paper money inflating your economy, but pure (digitized) information traded in the wild is in a form where the concept of that which is "counterfeit" no longer applies. Digitized data's very essence is of mitosis and redundancy. This is the same reason that there does not exist tradeable electronic currency: there exists no provision to prevent it's counterfeiting and thus devaluation.
Just because everything you choose to release your personally created software into the public domain, does not mean that all copyrightable work
I flatly disagree with this statement. Copyright, by definition has to do with copying. The very nature of copying has been changed significantly by every advancement in information technology since man first painted in caves.
The state of the art is that, as my previous post points out, every single time information is digitally transfered from one location to another it is copied, in virtually all instances breaking the letter of copyright law.
When you purchase a song from the iTunes store, the iTunes server is rubbing off a fresh copy for you (which I would imagine the vendor gets specifically licensed to do these days, in contrast to record stores which are afforded no such liberty). While the data is delivered to your location, it is copied again on every router in the internet that it passes through. The "original packets" are irretrievably lost each hop, however few things prevent the routers from storing extra copies of the data for their own uses. Most notably for deep packet inspection and for protocol throttling, but I'll leave net-neutrality to a separate thread. There is also cached proxying for performance benefit, multicast for popular streaming performances like internet radio and IPTV, and buffering for redelivery in network congestion. These copy operations are neither licensed nor protected by fair use by the farthest stretch of imagination, yet content producers would never dare to hobble their customers' experience by interfering with such common practices. So long as the producers somehow get to step 4 PROFIT, they don't mind that the law they rely on is being shredded in step 3 ???.
On arrival at your computer, the download exists in memory and then is copied to the hard drive. Were you granted license for that copy operation? Each time you play the file, new copies are made from the hard drive and transfered back into memory. This without even beginning to discuss getting the song to play on other media players (aka other devices, normally copy operations without the original being deleted), personal backups, playing media at a remote location via RDP, or public performances of ringtones.
Are these personal copy operations covered by fair use? Apparently not all of them, and it's never been tested in court. The DRM content producers try to root your personal devices with certainly doesn't think so. If they had their way, you would be required to pay for a fresh copy every time you listen to the song, and every time you jog 5 seconds back to re-examine a misheard lyric. And why not? They have no stake in the matter short of how many feathers they can pull from the goose with a minimum of hissing.
On the other hand, let's say I encrypt my "copy" of the download in a RAR with a password. Now I have this encrypted RAR, and I know the password. I copied the song from my hard drive to memory, no differently from when I play the song, but then I bake a new encrypted file based upon that data.
The encrypted file is not a copy of the song, because lacking the password one cannot retrieve the song from the RAR. What would one call this from a legal standpoint, a "derivitive work"? I ask because the next question becomes obvious: would I be breaking this antiquated law by sharing the encrypted RAR file or not? Prior to also disclosing the password, I am in no substantial sense "sharing" the song. Also, I am in no sane manner "copying" the song. How can I be said to be in violation of copyright short of overstepping my rights by making an unauthorized copy?
That is the heart of my point. I contend that the application of copyright does break down where the rubber of digital technology meets the road. Even as you move away from the bare metal it takes no effort to see the detrimental effects of trying to enforce such a law where it is inapplicable. There is no grey market and fair use is a distant memory simply because the big players in media distribution have taken it upon thems
I'm afraid to google for the damned thing, I don't want to go to prison.
Don't ask about it, don't discuss it, don't download media materially related to the discussion. If you do, you are playing Russian Roulette with a felony arrest and ostrasism in in the barrel, even if it's a prosecutor's lark and you're never convicted.
You cannot define obscenity without being obscene. This means you also cannot debate obscenity, or even defend yourself against baseless allegations without utilizing obscenity in the process. This is sand our society cannot draw a line in without first crossing it.
So to define this line, we play a legislative game of Mao. We can't tell you what is obscene without being obscene, so we'll instead wait for someone to cross the imaginary line and then prosecute them. As enough of people are garroted on the imaginary fence, ordinary citizens begin to get an idea of where they can travel safely. Googling for an example of a controversial work will, at best, make you a great warning example for those who follow you.;)
This would waste bandwidth, but it means the service is not making a copy of the file - it is moving the file.
One of the biggest reasons that Copyright fails when applied to digital information is that, unlike the physical analogue, digital information cannot be "moved" (short of moving the physical medium, that is..).
Protecting a person's right to "copy" something is only vaguely sane when the alternative of moving the content exists. "I can't let you copy my book, but I'll sell you the copy I have." fosters a grey market which is vital to keeping prices in check. Digital information cannot be "moved", however. It can be "copied" and then "deleted", but that necessitates the initial "copy" step which violates the law. Furthermore there is no proof the original ever really gets "deleted", or that alternate copies were not made (what of your backup tapes?)
The only reasonable solution is to abolish copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
That is some good leverage to drill through some of the wood presented by the obtuse commenters on this article.
You can say Wave is "realtime email", "conversational wiki", "IM that can build documents", "Office Suite with Version Control", or "Collaborative Content Management System".
Doing this improperly leverages things people already understand, but in a pretty systematic way people can be flatlanded beyond if necessary.
For example:
An automobile is "horseless carriage"
Email is like postal mail, but somehow electronic in nature.
Instant Messaging is like a phone call, but with text and always over the internet.
An Office Productivity Suite is pen-and-paperless pen and paper.
A Wiki is a collaborative CMS where you let raw edits act as check and balance over raw edits.
In turn, a CMS is a webpage who's content can be managed via a form on another webpage.
And finally, a webpage is like a magazine insert delivered over computer networks.
Every one of these descriptions leverages previously familiar comparisons and is technically accurate. Each one is also left somewhat lackluster to the uninitiated, due to unfamiliarity with how the advantages of the new format are leveraged to significantly alter the underlying expectations of the medium.
Email is like Snail mail, but you simply do not use it the same way. It changes the very method by which you work due to it's instant and electronic nature, and the added features this new environment allows both enhances and alters the stale practice of delivering textual missives dramatically.
A car gets passengers and goods from point A to B much like a horse-drawn carriage, but it's maintenance and upkeep are significantly different. Given roads, it's top and sustainable speeds are much faster. Given assembly line production, it's initial and total cost of ownership are magnitudes cheaper. These added benefits are both subtle enough to not be guessed by the uninitiated, and comprise "killer" application at the same time.
So to with Wave. The theory behind it is that it allows you to reap all the rewards of Email, Mailing lists, Usenet, IM, Wiki, CMS, comment threads, collaborative Document Creation with version control, and whiteboarding (among many other standalone apps) in one seamless application: replacing all of these disparate functions with one single, well crafted function that happens to accomplish all of their goals, and without increasing the complication for the user to tap into any subset of these features whatsoever (including, but not limited to each of the boring old models actually listed).
It allows conversations to be treated just like we do email, save that annoying comment quotes are entirely obviated by direct in-post replies. Replies are realtime, so you are never required to switch gears into a separate IM environment for that interactive benefit. Other's content is editable, and changes are traceable and accountable so "fixed that for you" becomes actually fixing that for them. Multiple people fixing the same thing is (allegedly) handled with greater conflict management than any present Wiki or Version Control system presently extant.
If product discussed in a conversation happens to be a document, then a Wave discussing the document inexorably evolves into actually writing the document in situ. Seriously, you don't even plan for it; the document crystallizes in front of you while you collaboratively imagine it so trying to export it elsewhere always presents as a wasteful excersize. If said document needs to be printed and collated, you hit the print button or export to ODF, PDF or DOC. If said document needs to be text on a web page, you hit the "embed" button and your continuing work to refine the final document in the wave (minus chatter, optionally with editorially controlled release cycles) is made transparently visible to the public wherever you've put the embed with no further intervention of server-side sof
My concern with Google being a monopoly is that monoculture harms whatever ecosystem it belongs to. Even if Google were to take great pains and bend over backwards to be a benevolent monopoly, it would still leave the industry 2 mistakes and a corrupt action from disaster.
I subscribe to the maxim that Honest People (or corporations) ought to be kept Honest by policy. It is a Good Thing for any person or organization to be trustworthy, to work to prove their reputation and to earn accolades. Nonetheless, it is always preferable to protect oneself by policy from whatever entities one can afford to, trustworthy or not. You should always value trustworthiness in third parties with which you transact, however actually relying on that trust should always be your last resort and ideally the result of a degenerate condition (for example: getting started, emergent events). Put another way, you should always reduce the surface area of your vulnerability, so that it does not take herculean amount of trust in others to patch over said vulnerability. To that end, organizations actually maximize profit by submitting to and encouraging such precaution of their client base.
To give an auto example (srsly, can't slashdot provide a CSS class or tag for these, already? ;D) you buckle up even if you know the car is being driven by a skilled and cautious expert. By our correct cultural convention, this habit does not impune the driver's skills, and to be honest any driver would be ethically remiss (fine liability notwithstanding) to start the car without insisting you first buckle up.
With this in mind, Google is completely missing many opportunities to protect other participants in it's industries from itself. From a Game Theory perspective, Google can avoid a classic monopolistic Nash Equilibrium in order to optimize profit better than it's current strategy will allow it by acting in a well thought out, systematic way to defeat it's very own stranglehold on affected industries.
For example, openly releasing the code for new products is important to prevent Google's own service provisions from being baked into the very fabric of new industries it spawns, which would mortally taint them. Google choosing not to be the only Wave server in town is vital for the acceptance of Wave as a platform. However, they do not seem to subscribe to this wisdom in some of their most vital industries. They wish all users to embrace cloud computing, but then do not open source their own cloud computing infrastructure. I'm sorry, but if I am not allowed to breathe this benfit into the big iron at my own corporate NOC first then I'll end up staying away from closed cloud computing solutions for as long as possible and when I do relent, I may lock myself into a platform Google's goods fail to interoperate with. This outcome is lose-lose, but only the cloud providers can take action to puncture this barrier to entry. Furthermore, the first one to do so wins an influential de facto standard. Also, losing a percentage of marketshare to self-starters may be quickly outweighed if your action also engorges the market so that your smaller "cut" is larger than the entire market would have otherwise been.
This holds not only for server app source code, but for trade secrets as well. Google is in such an over-powerful position in many of it's industries that it would economically benefit from releasing part (not all!) of it's portfolio of trade secrets on matters like search and advertising specifically to allow it's competitors to enrich themselves. This should be done just enough to diffuse the common argument "Man! I hate that Google does X, but there is no other reasonably effective search in town". Whenever your customers are not allowed to vote with their feet, your own innovation and by extension the very health of your industry decays.
A competent client should not introduce too much delay due to crypto, and if that's such a problem then simply batch the deltas a bit less frequently. For real, if the other end of the conversation is delayed for up to 1-2 seconds, will that kill the interactivity? I recall getting many impressive bits of chat done on 300 baud modems back in the day, and I would gladly go back to that latency level if it were needed in the name of crypto and real security. After all, anything is better than the present state of the art by way of line-based or post-based updates.
The other thing to consider is that realtime text is already encrypted quite comfortably in protocols such as SSH, where latency would delay your interaction with a perfectly reflective command line shell instead of an air-headed co-worker who is probably too busy guzzling venti latte to even notice you've typed, let alone respond within minutes.
That being said, FFS offer end to end security.. and then the next big point is unintentional data disclosure. It sounds like they will fix that to cover their own asses, so mark that as a win.
Looking forward to? geez, didn't you get the spam^Wmemo that you can fill out surveys and click on ads to make $$$ from HOAM? ;D
Srsly though, entertainment requires creativity in one form or another to be instantiated. Information does not require it (though many paid content providers try to slather it on), information only requires access to raw empirical data. If I'm too poor to have someone sing and dance the data for me, then I'll simply collate it myself, thank you.
hmm, free newspapers as fishwrap almost sound like a good idea, but I honestly do stick with the paper towels. Not a waste, but orders of magnitude cheaper than NYT D:
if they do publish something factual you'd want to verify it anyway.
Naturally, but you can pay for the second opinion too, can't you? What every producer knows is that Joe Citizen has as much disposable income as they do.
I think that is pretty much the intent of Diller's rant. He is attempting to chastise all digital consumers in one swoop for failing to pay for his clients' content and preferring free alternatives.
Strangely enough, nobody will stop his clients from charging their customers. We'll just stop being customers and take our <$0.01 business elsewhere. There is no content in "The New York Times" that I feel worth investing 15% the cost of my entire internet pipe just to see. In contrast I do pay $10/yr for Wired magazine, and they actually bundle that up in paper with pretty graphics and drop it on my doorstep. Yeah, apparently even if every story in Wired were online first and for free, I'd still pay for their rag just so I don't have to bring a laptop into the bathroom with me. Since the content can be had online for free (and earlier, is it?) but I'm not drawing it there, this demonstrates that I am not paying for the canned content but for it's delivery.
Now if I wanted to kill thousands of trees and blow $50/mo for more than one man is ever going to read, then I could get NYT's bathroom delivery feature as well. But, two magazines per month is about all the data I consume in that niche, and current political minutiae interest me less than technological innovation. So even if the comparison were fair, Wired would win in the battle over the audience of "me".
When I'm out of the bathroom, I aggregate dozens of blogs. They don't cost me anything and the trees get to live. I'm neither subscribing to nor paying attention to what misinformation embedded reporters in iraq are being paid or fooled into feeding me, nor the spin some editor wants to place on a story about some bill in congress. I draw my data from enough varied sources to correct spins and slants by sheer volume. NYT needs to rethink not only it's revenue model but it's content model. Just like AOL which fell before it, NYT must stop trying to do the thinking for it's users and charging them for the privilege. Cut the fat, and focus on obtaining revenue for and delivering what can't be had elsewhere (perhaps investigative journalism) and drop expenses for which free alternatives abound (AP feed, endless op-ed). What are they seriously doing with all this money they charge us and the advertisers anyhow?
Not necessarily true. Consider this possibility: ... Two types of ISPs remain: those that carry big media and those that carry indy media.
Gads, you are right! Such an eventuality would be sobering indeed. The Big Media fast lane, with instant access to high definition content, would have to be easy to navigate however. Maybe instead of web addresses, content could be indexed by simple numbers. Then the American Idle (I do like that term ;D) could consume the content by wielding a control device (instead of a keyboard and mouse) that does little more than change feeds to the next "channel" as it were.
Having such a content juggernaut fed by the gamut of Big Media would certainly make a person think twice before selecting a more complicated, open platform where all you could access are no-account indie content such as My Bank's Website, My Local Realtor's Listings, and Email From My Boss.
If they were happy with the quality of casual snapshots, they wouldn't be complaining about what is on Wikipedia now.
I don't know if the "quality of a casual snapshot" is the issue as much as "the quality of a casual snapshot taken by someone the star was trying hard not to be seen by".
Something as simple as the publicist's lacky hefting a mid-range, 10mpx digital camera in a well lit corner of the office with the star dressed well and in make up, and if it still needs to be touched up get some photoshop nerd at the office to do it. You have basic presentation and a model who is focusing on looking good for the shot for less than $1k of everyone's time so you don't need to drop 100k on a studio and who know how many times that to bicker over the rights. This will get you a much better shot than the grainy, pockmarked image you complain about on wikipedia on the cheap.
Then is $1k too much for publicity? How else do you defend the ROI of your beamer, sir?
In truth none of it has to do with favorable representation or compensation for photography. It simply has to do with certain publicists hoping to pressure the wikimedia foundation into granting them ownership over a small corner of the encyclopedia. If WM caves, it means they would have to seek permission to republish the encylopedia in different forms.. to provide copies in developing countries.. freeze copies to CD, and that's when the gouging would begin. It also means all the about.com's of the world could no longer freely copy from or expand upon content from WM without picking out the grisle.
So yeah, it's largely an example of why and how copyright in general is absurd. Applying copyright to a work devalues it to others, and makes them seek alternatives even if they have lower objective quality. It debases your work. Sure, you put a restrictive license on your gratuitously expensive photograph which means you get to drag random people into court in the future if you become displeased by the manner in which they come to use it. What good does that do you when we'll all simply obtain creative commons or public domain photographs whose use cannot threaten to harm us? Or, if you've made certain none exist, we just won't represent your precious star. I'm sure there is someone, somewhere willing to take the risk that people will figure out what they look like, even if it means that there is no legal recourse when someone publishes a copy with a mustache painted on.
Put simply: represent yourself, and your clients, to the world in a manner we can envelope without danger to ourselves, or else we'll be forced to do the representing for you (as we have done). We would love as much as you for your star's picture to be pretty and shiny, but we're not stupid enough to sign our soul to you for the privilege.
So what? All that proves is that you've moved the point of execution, and the vulnerability on into your head.
And don't expect Motoko to dive in just to save your ghost. :P
such as assuming that nobody will ever guess that putting in a password of "&aR4q=Xj9_n½" will give them administrator access.
I would have edited in a password like "12345", but I had to enclose it in "strong" tags so that felt kind of cheap.
"Security through obscurity" means that lack of information is the only thing keeping something secure
yeah, kind of like lacking my username and password is one of the few practical things keeping you from using my online identity, and lacking my credit card number keeps you from running me into debt. Things like that. ;3
That's close, but not quite broad enough: For a lot of voters the word "child" is enough to shut down the rational part of their brain.
Sweet, so: "Think of the children!" has now been replaced by "Stop thinking, for the children's sake!"
I installed Win7 on a machine previously running Win2000; kept old HD just in case. Used it. Liked it. Stable, did not appear a bit slower than Win2k on my 2.7Ghz single core with 1GB ram. Improved user friendliness by way of Simple English controls. I can see the benefit there for novice users, and experts after a brain-fizzling day at work alike.
BUT
I still rolled right on back to Win2k after a week's worth of testing.
Why roll back if there was zero faults I could find?
It doesn't do anything new.
It's as shiny as all get out, but I don't care much for my OS being shiny.
It could have "an improved network stack", but is not capable of any new network features. For example, I can't set DHCP alongside static IP's on a single interface. I've been waiting for someone to offer that now for 15 years.
It might be "more secure".. and to be honest, I was quite impressed by the user accounts management and program install policies.. but my natted Win2K box with my usage policies has stood the test of time and requires no extra security.
So, beyond the superficial there is really no advantage to the upgrade for me. Now, list the disadvantages to upgrading an existing install:
* buy OS, yet again (or figure out how to pirate it and worry about keeping on the upgrade path and avoid kill switches)
* reinstall all the software, some of which needs to either be rebought or repirated. Reconfigure all the settings. In short, every time you find something that doesn't work like before, you have to stop to tweak with it. After a week, I still couldn't get a thing done without tripping all over things that needed configurational TLC.
Now reconfig will happen whenever you start anew, which is inevitable as the machine will eventually die. However, this machine won't die any later after installing the new OS and going through a gratuitous reconfig step. In short, no pros and some cons. Verdict, not happening.
So, congrats M$ on distracting us all with how terrible Vista was for long enough to sink our expectations and try to make us say nice things about Win7 being relatively better. I admit it is marginally better and marginally more resource conservative than XP. On a new machine, Win7 > XP. But you'll still never get our old machines, because Win7 is not a DECADE more advanced than XP, as it really ought to be.
It's time someone changed the GOD DAMNED PARADIGM. The entire OS abstraction that most of the world relies upon today is outdated. I welcome ChromeOS now, not because I am concerned many people will use it, but I hope it will gadfly M$, Apple, AND the OSS community into doing an operating system properly for a change.
I can't say what a truly superior, worth-trying paradigm will look like.. but I have some small recommendations:
* scrap the directory-based filesystem. Tag files, and make it easy to use tags like directories.
* Once you've perfected ACLs for the new filesystem, use something very similar on the network stack. Relying on third party firewall apps to track application to network bindings indicates the present approach is too loose in this regard.
* Jail every app by default. Give them all hooks to the same kernel, but no access to the same filesystem, network infrastructure, or message loop by default. App jails should have similar separation to user accounts. Apps put windows on the same screen for a user, but cannot "see" one another by default. Apps can be granted shared access, IPC conduits, or access to broad resources (screenshot utilities, VNC clients etc) but should not have such privileges by default. Approaching things in this direction ought to obviate 99% of the local security concerns most people are bothered about, and the ones Win7 tries so valiantly to defend you against. EG, why shit bricks about every piece of software that gets installed when many of them do not require the broad power current OS's afford them? Keep honest applications honest and nip the prob
Google is a business that runs on Linux, but when they decided to develop a web browser, the chief developers were Windows-only guys who admitted they knew nothing about developing portable code, or developing on Linux.
No, I think it's more fair to say that Google is a business who's servers run on Linux CLI, but they use Macintosh primarily and Windows secondarily as their workstations. Yes, I am lacking a citation there.. I can't easily find one in a quick search either way, but I get my data from the only Google employee I've ever chatted with, corroborated by the Google story on 60 minutes showing exclusively OSX workstations.
Given that, if they use Mac for their desktop (and sink money into that vertical hardware stack) instead of reveling in all of the power and TCO of Gnu/Linux/X11, there must be a disincentive. If the (allegedly) smartest CS minds on the planet can't be bothered to compile their own kernel, why should I?
The network transparency costs practically nothing when running local apps (it uses shared memory)
Using shared memory in order to pretend you are talking across a network when you are not, compared to not wasting any time or resources on the irrelevant, is a real and a significant cost. X11 fanboys are allergic to KISS.
Right now I am sitting in front of a machine that has windows from applications running on four different machines
I... have to ask why, of course. If you can run an app from machine Q and have the bandwidth to put the window on your local machine, what on earth are you doing that you couldn't just run the app on your local machine? Are you trying to control resources at remote locations or something? Is this effort so vital to the core principals of your OS that every window has to pretend to be doing this and burn (cheap, but still exhaustible) resources just to pretend to be behaving this way all the time?
unless you happen to know which applications are running where, you'd think they were all local apps.
Well, that throws your "from any OS, to any OS" argument out the window. I've used Cygwin to test running an X .. um .. client? server? on my Windows machine so I could launch apps hosted on a Debian machine in the past. I could certainly tell which windows were which. The GUI elements were different, the clipboard did not transfer over, and the save/open dialog boxes showed me the foreign drive arrangements. Quite vertigo inducing really, so I never made that mess part of a complete breakfast.
Just because you don't happen to use it doesn't mean there aren't a great many people who do use it regularly.
I am sorry to have offended all twelve of you then by suggesting that MY personal CPU has better things to do than wasting millions of it's 1.6 billion cycles per second on the off chance I might start doing what you do. X11's inefficiencies make memory-resident quick starters look like child's play. :P
The worst idea I am personally aware of is the assumption that just because "everyone" seems to agree on a particular point, that it means that the point must be right.
Specifically, false consensus is a dangerous beast. Do not rely upon it.
The loudest and most powerful developers all swear by X, therefor all influential Linux distros and popular Linux Apps rely solely upon that monoculture.
How do the users feel about X? I can't say for certain; they don't even know what X is. All I can say is that they definitely aren't using it. They massively choose Windows or Macintosh instead. Tellingly, it is much simpler to get users to download, install, and use free Firefox on Windows or even Mac than it is to get them to download, install and use a free OS.
I cannot say that I trust Google's privacy choices either, but they seem to recognize that most people want to get to their Email quickly and that most of the user interaction and effort required by modern OSen is a distraction from actually getting their job done.
Now, we'll just have to wait and see how well they can deliver upon their core promises. I don't know, perhaps it will fail to meet it's goals. Bitching that X isn't one of it's goals sounds disingenuous to me, however. I am reminded of Ron Paul supporters flaming me for choosing not to vote. Nobody owes your software product any patronage, people can use or develop whatever they would like. If you want Google using X, maybe stop flaming them and name calling on the one hand, and on the other hand put forth some effort to demonstrate that X (or whatever you are trying to sell them on) will actually meet their needs. They do not appear to believe that is true and you don't seem to want them on board anyway, so do us all a favor and STFU.
But...... they can't get Chromium to run right on X. Solution? To much fanfare, replace X.
If they do replace X, and their replacement is a modular FOSS software project, I would love to see it made available in other distrobutions to compete with X.
You can moan about "X haters" all that you want, but if you do not wish to have competition it implies that you know your project is inferior.
And oh, anyone else notice the irony that the Chrome _browser_ for Linux seems largely like an afterthought right now? Still, way to go, Google.
I don't see this as an irony. I see this as an: "Damn! It's hard to make Chrome work on GNU/X11/Linux! WTF? *research*research*research*... wow, you know it will be easier to replace X11 than it will be to port Chromium into it. D:
Sure, there are other goals being met here: "yay we make an OS nao!" // "yay, our OS has an excuse to initially be incompatible with applications which do not display our ads!" But as for myself, it's all about "Yay! die X11 you bastard, die a painful death! ;D" and "Yay! More commercial investment in FOSS OSen to weaken the Windows monopoleh!"
I don't see why another windowing system is a good thing.
Because we haven't found an intersection of "FOSS" and "doesn't sucks" yet? ;D
It's meaningless to call something a Linux distribution unless it at least provides enough of the userspace stuff (glibc, pthreads, X, etc, etc) that you have a hope in hell of running a Linux app on it.
I, for one, am happy calling a "Linux distribution" any distribution of software which provides a user interface backed by a linux kernel. What you are describing, one would assume would be a "Gnu/Xorg/Pthreads/Linux/I-wanna-run-my-XYZ-software" distribution.
Otherwise, your semantic complaint sounds equivalent to MS-fanboys popular battle cry "It's not really an OS unless it runs all of my Windows apps and games." I am not the only person who is interested to see X's dominance in the FOSS GUI ecosystem get challenged. X is bloated and old.
Over the past decade, I have tried numerous linux distros (Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, et al) with numerous window managers (Gnome, KDE, XDM) on the same hardware as M$ counterparts (Win 98/2000/XP/7RC). On a new install or after video hardware upgrade, the X options always leave me needing to edit xorg.conf either from the CLI or from an eyeball bleeding 60Hz video mode on CRT's. Also, I have never seen a single GUI element.. from a window to a menu to a button to the cursor itself.. render any faster, smoother, or more reliably in X than it does in Windoze. (XDM ties at drawing empty boxes as fast as Win7 Aero can swoop blurry, frosted glass onto the screen. I do not count this as a win.)
Now let's add Android and MacOS/Quartz into the comparison. On comparable hardware to a windows machine, these Linux based, X-liberated offerings provide an even smoother and more responsive user interface experience than Windows.
I would like to point out that Linux GUI distributions have negligible desktop marketshare today. I would like to point out that M$ has tried like gangbusters to surrender it's marketshare wholesale to Linux by bullying it's customers into the non-option of Vista (most of whom can not afford to burn dough on a Mac) for THREE YEARS STRAIGHT now. I submit that X's inferior performance is a big reason for this failure to launch.. combined with the proprietary windows hardware drivers problem, and the FOSS developers disincentive for refugee lusers sullying their sacred OSen.
Now, Google is claiming to back a project which might get lusers off of Windows, and into a snappy OS based on Linux, but with none but corner case support headaches for FOSS developers. As long as Google can crunch the driver problem (which, would we not all benefit from that?) I am significantly confused why so many people are butthurt over X being passed up here.
Hello MobyDisk, here is a level headed response if I have ever seen one. Please accept my apologies if my previous post came off as pretentious or caustic at all.
I concede to your point that law does not always require a perfectly obvious trail through which to draw a boundary (such as what constitutes copying and what does not) in order to be applicable. However what I was hoping to illustrate was that globally available perfect-fidelity (digital) data transfer honestly demolishes the foundational assumptions of copyright, such that the perceived rights of the producers and consumers can no longer be simultaneously honored by this model.
The key to the change is the act of commoditization. A physical book or sheet of music can be treated as a commodity. The producer can spend money creating copies, and consumers can purchase and then optionally resell these physical copies. If the information inherent to these copies (text of the book, notes of the song) are reprinted by a rival who seeks to dodge the creative cost to undersell at retail, then the law can punish the rival who must invest, therefor recoup marginal costs to create their copies and therefor has difficulty remaining below the radar.
In a world where information is expensive to broadcast or to transmit from one location to another, this was relied upon as an economic bandaid and acted as a subsidy for creative effort. The US constitution initially provided a limited timeframe for this copyright protection, so that the fruits of this subsidized creativity would pass into the public domain to enrich the pool of available ideas from which new creative minds could draw.
The initial purpose of Copyright was to subsidize a wellspring of creativity in order to enrich the public domain, much like scientific grants are meant to subsidize research which is then made public for the benefit of all. The twentieth century has seen copyright provide an overbalance of power to content producers, who have then perverted the law to cover virtually all creative works in a clever form of perpetuity.
These wrongs must not only be rectified, but the underlying market landscape has changed sufficiently to obviate copyright entirely. Today, even short copyright terms are detrimental compared to the benefits of outright abolition, since there is no longer significant cost in distributing canned creative work, and non-canned work.. custom work, online services, in-house development.. have no need of copyright protection.
We now live in a world where information rarely needs a medium more tangible than a binary representation, which can in turn be transmitted between virtually any pair of willing parties spanning the globe with insignificant marginal cost. Furthermore, burning physical optical media and even printing books have plummeted to nearly as cheap levels.
As a result, any consumer of digital media can choose to redistribute the data they have purchased to any willing parties in the world almost instantly. The cost of doing so is so low that no recoup is needed, most individuals who choose this (presently illegal) path do so for no more profit than peer recognition and tit for tat.
Digitally encoded copies of information, as opposed to physically bound copies, are not and can not be treated as commodities. By their very definition they are not scarce whereas physical commodities are. One can complain about the existence of a "counterfeit" book devaluing yours, of counterfeit paper money inflating your economy, but pure (digitized) information traded in the wild is in a form where the concept of that which is "counterfeit" no longer applies. Digitized data's very essence is of mitosis and redundancy. This is the same reason that there does not exist tradeable electronic currency: there exists no provision to prevent it's counterfeiting and thus devaluation.
Just because everything you choose to release your personally created software into the public domain, does not mean that all copyrightable work
Copyright has nothing to do with technology.
I flatly disagree with this statement. Copyright, by definition has to do with copying. The very nature of copying has been changed significantly by every advancement in information technology since man first painted in caves.
The state of the art is that, as my previous post points out, every single time information is digitally transfered from one location to another it is copied, in virtually all instances breaking the letter of copyright law.
When you purchase a song from the iTunes store, the iTunes server is rubbing off a fresh copy for you (which I would imagine the vendor gets specifically licensed to do these days, in contrast to record stores which are afforded no such liberty). While the data is delivered to your location, it is copied again on every router in the internet that it passes through. The "original packets" are irretrievably lost each hop, however few things prevent the routers from storing extra copies of the data for their own uses. Most notably for deep packet inspection and for protocol throttling, but I'll leave net-neutrality to a separate thread. There is also cached proxying for performance benefit, multicast for popular streaming performances like internet radio and IPTV, and buffering for redelivery in network congestion. These copy operations are neither licensed nor protected by fair use by the farthest stretch of imagination, yet content producers would never dare to hobble their customers' experience by interfering with such common practices. So long as the producers somehow get to step 4 PROFIT, they don't mind that the law they rely on is being shredded in step 3 ???.
On arrival at your computer, the download exists in memory and then is copied to the hard drive. Were you granted license for that copy operation? Each time you play the file, new copies are made from the hard drive and transfered back into memory. This without even beginning to discuss getting the song to play on other media players (aka other devices, normally copy operations without the original being deleted), personal backups, playing media at a remote location via RDP, or public performances of ringtones.
Are these personal copy operations covered by fair use? Apparently not all of them, and it's never been tested in court. The DRM content producers try to root your personal devices with certainly doesn't think so. If they had their way, you would be required to pay for a fresh copy every time you listen to the song, and every time you jog 5 seconds back to re-examine a misheard lyric. And why not? They have no stake in the matter short of how many feathers they can pull from the goose with a minimum of hissing.
On the other hand, let's say I encrypt my "copy" of the download in a RAR with a password. Now I have this encrypted RAR, and I know the password. I copied the song from my hard drive to memory, no differently from when I play the song, but then I bake a new encrypted file based upon that data.
The encrypted file is not a copy of the song, because lacking the password one cannot retrieve the song from the RAR. What would one call this from a legal standpoint, a "derivitive work"? I ask because the next question becomes obvious: would I be breaking this antiquated law by sharing the encrypted RAR file or not? Prior to also disclosing the password, I am in no substantial sense "sharing" the song. Also, I am in no sane manner "copying" the song. How can I be said to be in violation of copyright short of overstepping my rights by making an unauthorized copy?
That is the heart of my point. I contend that the application of copyright does break down where the rubber of digital technology meets the road. Even as you move away from the bare metal it takes no effort to see the detrimental effects of trying to enforce such a law where it is inapplicable. There is no grey market and fair use is a distant memory simply because the big players in media distribution have taken it upon thems
I'm afraid to google for the damned thing, I don't want to go to prison.
Don't ask about it, don't discuss it, don't download media materially related to the discussion. If you do, you are playing Russian Roulette with a felony arrest and ostrasism in in the barrel, even if it's a prosecutor's lark and you're never convicted.
You cannot define obscenity without being obscene. This means you also cannot debate obscenity, or even defend yourself against baseless allegations without utilizing obscenity in the process. This is sand our society cannot draw a line in without first crossing it.
So to define this line, we play a legislative game of Mao. We can't tell you what is obscene without being obscene, so we'll instead wait for someone to cross the imaginary line and then prosecute them. As enough of people are garroted on the imaginary fence, ordinary citizens begin to get an idea of where they can travel safely. Googling for an example of a controversial work will, at best, make you a great warning example for those who follow you. ;)
This would waste bandwidth, but it means the service is not making a copy of the file - it is moving the file.
One of the biggest reasons that Copyright fails when applied to digital information is that, unlike the physical analogue, digital information cannot be "moved" (short of moving the physical medium, that is..).
Protecting a person's right to "copy" something is only vaguely sane when the alternative of moving the content exists. "I can't let you copy my book, but I'll sell you the copy I have." fosters a grey market which is vital to keeping prices in check. Digital information cannot be "moved", however. It can be "copied" and then "deleted", but that necessitates the initial "copy" step which violates the law. Furthermore there is no proof the original ever really gets "deleted", or that alternate copies were not made (what of your backup tapes?)
The only reasonable solution is to abolish copyright.