There was a great photo in the spring issue of Adbusters (but unfortunately they don't have the photo online.) It was a shot of a typical suburban mini-mall intersection, with all of the text and logos airbrushed out, so that all that remained was the shapes of the signs. It was very eerie: it looked almost normal, but something was just not quite right... it took a while of looking at it to realize what was going on.
Ads are so much a part of our world now that when they're gone, it feels like something's gone wrong. Creepy...
Lots of people are asking questions about physical security, and how you're going to repel missiles and commandos, but I've got the opposite question: why do you need physical security and a physical location at all? Would not the best way to protect your customers' data be to wrap it in hard crypto and distribute it far and wide across the whole of the net, ensuring that there is not a single point of failure or a single physical installation that can be isolated?
As we've seen again and again recently, the best protection against censorship and other legal attacks is massive redundancy and decentralization.
Why are you guys harping on the plot when there was all that fabulous motorcycle porn? I'd say the best moment was when he did a stoppie, pivotted around on the front tire, and took off going in the opposite direction, all the while firing a gun. Damn!
As far as the plot went, I did think it was a nice touch that the bad guy was obviously smarter than the good guy, and anticipated his every move.
So, at least in the near future, it does not seem that the Net can make the life of small bands or authors much better. Even more annoying, there remains the question of how to fund the content producers.
Some people contend that artists could live on money raised in gigs. I do not know the economics of a band such as Metallica, but I bet that gig tours are not that interesting financially (some tours of famous bands have actually lost money). Furthermore, not every artist can afford to spend most of his life on the road (yes, they can have a life, children etc...).
I think a very interesting point that a lot of people are overlooking here is, who says the music industry has some innate right to exist? Who says that it has to be possible to become a millionaire by playing in a rock band?
Evolution and natural selection don't cause individual organisms to adapt to their environment. The primary tool of evolution is extinction.
Industries arise, thrive, and eventually die. Some of them take thousands of years, some far less long.
The music industry as we know it has existed for just about sixty years. Sixty years!
What happened before that? Did we not have music before that? Of course we did. We just didn't have millionaire musicians. We had millionaires, of course, but they did that in other ways.
This is how the free market works. Sometimes, in a profitable industry, the bottom drops out, and you can no longer make money doing it. (Try making money selling web browsers today, for example. Or gas lamps.) The people who are in that dying industry will fight as hard as they can to stave off the inevitable, because it's in their best interest to do so. But that doesn't mean that they have some fundamental right to the continuance of the status quo. Just because it has been that way doesn't mean it will always be that way, or that it's somehow a natural right for it to have ever been that way.
That said, I think this was a great interview, and I'm really glad Lars agreed to it. I understand their point of view a lot better now.
(However, Slashdot folks -- SPELL CHECK! It would have caught the zillion typos you made when transcribing Lars's words.)
I *am* a web designer and writer, and a lot of the work I've done over the past five years *has* gotten imitated, for better or worse. For instance, oddly enough, the original Mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org) was copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did The Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org/): from the technique, to the color palette, to the crude four-pixel black outlines around content areas. Don't bother checking; the new Mozilla layout has evolved away from that original look, though it still bears trace elements of the original design. A lot of you probably do remember the original Mozilla layout. I'm sure when Roblimo saw it, he realized it was copied from http://www.webstandards.org and I think that's the kind of thing he was referring to in his overly kind introduction to my work.
Well, that's really interesting, but I'm afraid it's just not true at all.
I designed and implemented the mozilla.org web site. It was not copied from your site, because I've never heard of you, or your site. (I've never heard of your petition either, but that's another matter entirely.)
On the other hand, the mozilla.org web site is just not very complicated: how many web sites have you seen that have a menu on the left and content on the right? I'd say, ``most of them.''
If I was inspired by any site, it was probably gimp.org, but mozilla.org didn't end up looking much like that in the end.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did
While I was in charge of mozilla.org, for that first year and a half, the site did not use CSS at all. Nor did it use any non-default font faces or sizes (except headings.) In fact, I was quite adamant that all documents on mozilla.org follow a style that rejected all the newest incompatible flavor-of-the-week bells and whistles that had shown up on the web in the last few years. I still care that documents be readable in Netscape 1.1. This was to the vocal dismay of people who were writing documents for the site, who thought that my insistence on consistency was an unnecessary hurdle for them.
I think the rationale behind assigning copyright to the FSF up front is to prevent another xemacs situation. The copyright for xemacs is so fragmented, the probability approaches zero that the fork can ever be joined. Preemptive copyright assignation (nifty term, eh?) would keep that from happening again.
Nice theory; too bad it has nothing to do with reality.
All of the work that went into Lucid Emacs had copyright assigned to the FSF. Let me say that again, since people seem to selectively forget it: every version of Lucid Emacs, from 19.0 through 19.10, had FSF copyright notices, and had all the appropriate paperwork signed and delivered to RMS. That did not prevent the fork. The fork happened for reasons that will hopefully be made clear to anyone who chooses to read the archive of the debate at the time rather than relying on rumor and half-remembered fragments.
It may be that the fact that today's XEmacs has many different copyrights in it makes a merge with FSFmacs be less likely, by virtue of the fact that RMS absolutely demands copyright assignment. However, the copyrights had nothing to do with the Lemacs/FSFmacs split, and the reasons for that split still exist as well: so the copyright issue is surely lost in the noise. Even if the XEmacs folks assigned RMS their copyrights tomorrow, a merger would still never happen, for all the same reasons as were true in 1992.
I've been investigating this a lot, and from what I can tell, the only way to get an LCD screen for under a thousand bucks is to buy an old low-powered laptop.
I would love to know of another source of 800x600 passive-matrix LCD screens, but as far as I can tell, laptops are it.
If you look around, you can find P90 laptops for around $400, not including network or CDROM.
termcap, terminfo, and various terms have been modified to support the Debian Backspace Guidelines
What's this? Neither Google nor Altavista have heard of it, and debian.org seems to be suffering from some kind of religious spasm that has caused them to take down their search page.
I'd love to use Linux for cash registers, because I'd like to have a point-of-sale system that was cheap...
This all ties back to the I-Opener discussion: why aren't there any super-cheap Linux-based kiosk systems available? Surely there's a market for these!
Like cash registers, ATMs are also just kiosks with a slot. You can just go out and buy an ATM, you know: you're responsible for filling it with money, and it runs software that knows how to authenticate itself to the banks. There's no reason this couldn't be a Linux system too, instead of being overpriced specialized hardware.
Some people might toss around the phrase ``information wants to be free'' as some kind of moral statement, but I've always interpreted it more along the lines of ``nature abhors a vaccuum.'' Obviously neither information nor nature have any feelings on the matter; both phrases are anthropomorphisms that describe properties of the world.
Information, by being infinitely duplicable and not tied to a physical object, has the tendency to expand far and wide, just as gasses have a tendency to to fill a container.
It's possible that Maxwell's Demon can keep those pesky molecules in line, and it's possible that information can be tightly controlled and treated as a subject of property just like physical objects can be.
Is there a natural right that you should be able to make a living as an artist?
Is there a natural right you should be able to make a living as a programmer? No, but you do have the right to demand a day's pay for a day's work.
You have no right to demand any such thing.
You might want to negotiate with someone as to whether they might be willing to exchange their money for your services. But of course they have no obligation to pay you if they aren't interested in your services. Nor are you under obligation to provide those services if they don't want to pay you what you think your services are worth.
This is what we call ``commerce.'' ``Rights'' don't enter into it.
No, thieves steal things. Pirates forcibly board ships, murder the crew, and then steal the cargo. Referring to illegal copying as piracy, even if you believe that the law is a right and moral law, is absurd.
If I were a pirate, I would be offended at people describing contract violations as piracy. That would belittle my entire career!
Breaking the terms under which someone releases them to you is stealing
No, that's not theft, that's a contract violation. They are different things.
To steal something is to take it away by force or without permission. But if on monday, you are in posession of something, and on wednesday, you are still in posession of that thing, how can it have been stolen on tuesday? Many people believe that information cannot be a subject of property, as it has no physical reality. The nature of property is tied up in the fact that objects can only be in one place at a time. Information doesn't work that way.
Intellectual property is an oxymoron.
"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and the improvement of his conditions, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement of exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813
All that said, I would like to live in a world where artists get compensated for their work, so that there is more incentive for artists to produce art. However, I don't think we live in that world today: the people getting compensated are, by and large, not the artists, but their lawyers.
I hope someone can figure out a way for artists to truly get compensated. But trying to put the Napster toothpaste back in the tube just isn't going to work.
The world has changed. Figure out a way to live with it.
ever wonder what it means to the less successful artists? The ones that won't merely need to switch toilet papers, but maybe switch career aspirations as well?
You are assuming that popular artists make a lot of money, and less popular artists make a little money, and things like MP3 will take money out of all of their pockets proportionally.
That's wrong.
The reality is that a handful of superstars make a lot of money, and all other artists make exactly nothing.
Small artists stand to benefit from free internet distribution of their music because it will get their music heard, since now they can go around the profit-sucking middlemen in the record labels.
This is not about artists losing money, this is about lawyers losing money.
What is Mr. McCartney, or any artist, suppose to do, just sit there while their life's work gets copied to oblivion?
Sit in limousine #74 and cry in his champagne?
It will be easier to take these anti-mp3 complaints seriously once we hear artists complaining who aren't already insanely rich! We're only hearing complaints from the people at the top of the food chain, who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Paul McCartney is doing NOTHING to MP3.com. A company which owns the rights to much of his music is doing something to MP3.com. Artists may literally sell their songs and figuratively their souls to the record company, but power of attorney as well?
While this is generally true, that artists tend to have no control over their music after they sign a contract, in this case the article says that McCartney is the principal owner of MPL -- so it's his company that is filing suit.
It's more like an older laptop LCD display - you have to be more-or-less directly in front of the screen to read it, and the video is blurry if you move the mouse around quickly, scroll quickly, etc. The display is definitely not as good as the display you would get if you bought a new laptop today, for example. I don't think the screen is any relative of the nice $1500 flat-panel displays That's pretty much what I expected, but that's really fine with me, for a kiosk application. Of course, this begs the question: what's the cheapest 800x600 VGA flat-screen one can buy? I'm ok with a narrow viewing angle and slow refresh, but I want to be able to plug it in to a standard cheapo video card. The only flatscreens I've ever seen for sale have been high-end ones. Is there somewhere to buy low-end ones for cheap?
I need some small, cheap, durable Linux machines to use as web kiosks. It sounded like these I-Opener things might do the job nicely, once fitted with some manner of ethernet. But I guess not any more.
The thing that's killing me here is that I'd really like to have flat-screens, since real monitors are just too damned big. But you can't get a flat-screen for less than around $1500, which is way too expensive.
Is it possible to re-use just the flat-screen from these I-Opener devices? Can you just plug them in to another computer, or are they specialized hardware? Because an 800x600 flat-screen for $99 still sounds like a good deal to me.
Any other suggestions for how to do kiosks cheaply?
In particular, I want something that you stand in front of, and that doesn't take up a lot of floor space.
I haven't downloaded the new version yet, but the Real G2 beta for Linux was definitely not Motif: it looks like they wrote their own GUI toolkit for it.
I agree it looks like crap, though. RealPlayer just doesn't have that much GUI (just a few menus and a preferences panel) so it would be easy to have both Motif and GTK versions of it. That's not where the majority of the code is.
The only thing IRIX has that Linux doesn't have (yet? Or is it in the kernel now?) is a spiffy filesystem.
SGI's X server kicks XFree's ass up and down the street. Not to disparage XFree: this is partly because the SGI X server itself is very, very good, but largely because SGI's graphics hardware is better than anything that you can buy in the PC world for love or money. I'm not talking about raw polygons/second in a full-screen window, I'm talking about use as a graphics-intensive desktop. There's nothing that compares to an O2, or even an Indy, as far as running an X desktop goes.
Do any of you know how I would go about obtaining the cabinet to a Cray X-MP? Not the computer, just the cabinet. You know, the one with a lovely built-in couch over the cooling unit. I've asked around, and I haven't gotten any good leads yet...
I think those of you who are calling this the worst X Files ever are forgetting just how bad the previous Gibson-scripted episode was. ``Invisigoth''? Puh-lease.
I thought it was an ok episode, in that the non-tech dialog made me laugh. (The tech dialog made me laugh too, but not in a good way.)
The fact that they didn't explain how virtual wounds became real, or where they vanished to, didn't really bother me, because this is the X Files after all: ghosts are real in their world, remember? They pulled similar tricks with the christmas episode with Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin... So presumably Jade is really a ghost that materialized through the game as some kind of frustration-avatar of the female hacker... (Didn't Gibson do a similar thing in Count Zero, with the Loa?)
The use of technology was pretty hard to take, though. But no worse than any other use of computers in tv or film. Of course, I completely loved Hackers, because it mostly didn't even try to be real: it was all abstract dream sequences, because watching someone hack is boring.
I thought the COPS episode was one of the funniest they've ever done! I got the feeling that a lot of it was improv: ``ok, go over there and question whoever answers the door...''
Good grief! How are they supposed to be making money on CDs when people are playing this music for free on the radio!?
Funny, but not true.
Let's say you walk into a clothing store. Let's say they have the radio on. How many times do you think someone was charged for that?
Three times.
The company that presses the CD has to pay the publisher of the music (ASCAP or BMI). This cost is passed on to the store that sells the CD, and eventually to the consumer who bought it, in this case the radio station.
The radio station has to pay ASCAP/BMI again, because the playing of the CD is considered a performance.
And the store that just happens to have the radio on has to pay yet a third time, because the act of turning on the radio within earshot of customers is also considered a performance.
In theory, ASCAP/BMI pass this money on to the record label and thence the artist. In practice, only the top-grossing fraction of a percent of any artists ever see any of this money. Almost all artists never see a dime from this racket.
Sure, Al invented the Internet, and Tipper is one of the world's foremost free speech advocates, but can they really hold a candle to the man who wrote California Über Alles and Holiday in Cambodia?
So, I've got lots of ideas for what I want to do with the club, but I'm always looking for more. And I could certainly use some help!
If you or your company have expertise in audio and/or video webcasting, dealing with ASCAP/BMI, micro-radio, installing networks and computer systems in public places, computer-controlled video mixing and light shows, or anything along those lines, then send me mail! I'm at the stage of the game where I've got a lot of ideas, but I'm still trying to work out which ones are practical, which ones I can afford, and which ones I should do first.
I want to blur the line between real-world and web communities: I want the physical space to be hooked in to the net in a way that hasn't been done before. Most nightclubs, even those that do webcasts, are still just a room, a bar, and a sound system. I want to go beyond that, and make something new.
If you're interested in helping out, or even if you just have suggestions, let me know! What would you like to see? What do you think would move the concept of ``nightclub'' to a new level?
Please don't think of this as an ``internet cafe'' kind of deal: in my experience internet cafes aren't even cafes, what they are is terminal rooms or photocopy stores that happen to sell espresso. What I'm building will definitely be a nightclub, with a lot of live music. But it will also be a web radio station, a web music zine, and a heavily wired physical space.
Help me build it! I think it's going to be a lot of fun...
Slashdot Mirror
There was a great photo in the spring issue of Adbusters (but unfortunately they don't have the photo online.) It was a shot of a typical suburban mini-mall intersection, with all of the text and logos airbrushed out, so that all that remained was the shapes of the signs. It was very eerie: it looked almost normal, but something was just not quite right... it took a while of looking at it to realize what was going on.
Ads are so much a part of our world now that when they're gone, it feels like something's gone wrong. Creepy...
Lots of people are asking questions about physical security, and how you're going to repel missiles and commandos, but I've got the opposite question: why do you need physical security and a physical location at all? Would not the best way to protect your customers' data be to wrap it in hard crypto and distribute it far and wide across the whole of the net, ensuring that there is not a single point of failure or a single physical installation that can be isolated?
As we've seen again and again recently, the best protection against censorship and other legal attacks is massive redundancy and decentralization.
As far as the plot went, I did think it was a nice touch that the bad guy was obviously smarter than the good guy, and anticipated his every move.
I think a very interesting point that a lot of people are overlooking here is, who says the music industry has some innate right to exist? Who says that it has to be possible to become a millionaire by playing in a rock band?
Evolution and natural selection don't cause individual organisms to adapt to their environment. The primary tool of evolution is extinction.
Industries arise, thrive, and eventually die. Some of them take thousands of years, some far less long.
The music industry as we know it has existed for just about sixty years. Sixty years!
What happened before that? Did we not have music before that? Of course we did. We just didn't have millionaire musicians. We had millionaires, of course, but they did that in other ways.
This is how the free market works. Sometimes, in a profitable industry, the bottom drops out, and you can no longer make money doing it. (Try making money selling web browsers today, for example. Or gas lamps.) The people who are in that dying industry will fight as hard as they can to stave off the inevitable, because it's in their best interest to do so. But that doesn't mean that they have some fundamental right to the continuance of the status quo. Just because it has been that way doesn't mean it will always be that way, or that it's somehow a natural right for it to have ever been that way.
That said, I think this was a great interview, and I'm really glad Lars agreed to it. I understand their point of view a lot better now.
(However, Slashdot folks -- SPELL CHECK! It would have caught the zillion typos you made when transcribing Lars's words.)
Kraaash your enemies...
see dem driffen before you...
und hear de lamentations uf dere wimmin...
Well, that's really interesting, but I'm afraid it's just not true at all.
I designed and implemented the mozilla.org web site. It was not copied from your site, because I've never heard of you, or your site. (I've never heard of your petition either, but that's another matter entirely.)
On the other hand, the mozilla.org web site is just not very complicated: how many web sites have you seen that have a menu on the left and content on the right? I'd say, ``most of them.''
If I was inspired by any site, it was probably gimp.org, but mozilla.org didn't end up looking much like that in the end.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
While I was in charge of mozilla.org, for that first year and a half, the site did not use CSS at all. Nor did it use any non-default font faces or sizes (except headings.) In fact, I was quite adamant that all documents on mozilla.org follow a style that rejected all the newest incompatible flavor-of-the-week bells and whistles that had shown up on the web in the last few years. I still care that documents be readable in Netscape 1.1. This was to the vocal dismay of people who were writing documents for the site, who thought that my insistence on consistency was an unnecessary hurdle for them.
You can read my style guide at http://www.mozilla.org/README-style.html.
Nice theory; too bad it has nothing to do with reality.
All of the work that went into Lucid Emacs had copyright assigned to the FSF. Let me say that again, since people seem to selectively forget it: every version of Lucid Emacs, from 19.0 through 19.10, had FSF copyright notices, and had all the appropriate paperwork signed and delivered to RMS. That did not prevent the fork. The fork happened for reasons that will hopefully be made clear to anyone who chooses to read the archive of the debate at the time rather than relying on rumor and half-remembered fragments.
It may be that the fact that today's XEmacs has many different copyrights in it makes a merge with FSFmacs be less likely, by virtue of the fact that RMS absolutely demands copyright assignment. However, the copyrights had nothing to do with the Lemacs/FSFmacs split, and the reasons for that split still exist as well: so the copyright issue is surely lost in the noise. Even if the XEmacs folks assigned RMS their copyrights tomorrow, a merger would still never happen, for all the same reasons as were true in 1992.
I would love to know of another source of 800x600 passive-matrix LCD screens, but as far as I can tell, laptops are it.
If you look around, you can find P90 laptops for around $400, not including network or CDROM.
What's this? Neither Google nor Altavista have heard of it, and debian.org seems to be suffering from some kind of religious spasm that has caused them to take down their search page.
I'd love to use Linux for cash registers, because I'd like to have a point-of-sale system that was cheap...
This all ties back to the I-Opener discussion: why aren't there any super-cheap Linux-based kiosk systems available? Surely there's a market for these!
Like cash registers, ATMs are also just kiosks with a slot. You can just go out and buy an ATM, you know: you're responsible for filling it with money, and it runs software that knows how to authenticate itself to the banks. There's no reason this couldn't be a Linux system too, instead of being overpriced specialized hardware.
Some people might toss around the phrase ``information wants to be free'' as some kind of moral statement, but I've always interpreted it more along the lines of ``nature abhors a vaccuum.'' Obviously neither information nor nature have any feelings on the matter; both phrases are anthropomorphisms that describe properties of the world.
Information, by being infinitely duplicable and not tied to a physical object, has the tendency to expand far and wide, just as gasses have a tendency to to fill a container.
It's possible that Maxwell's Demon can keep those pesky molecules in line, and it's possible that information can be tightly controlled and treated as a subject of property just like physical objects can be.
But it's not bloody likely.
You have no right to demand any such thing.
You might want to negotiate with someone as to whether they might be willing to exchange their money for your services. But of course they have no obligation to pay you if they aren't interested in your services. Nor are you under obligation to provide those services if they don't want to pay you what you think your services are worth.
This is what we call ``commerce.'' ``Rights'' don't enter into it.
No, thieves steal things. Pirates forcibly board ships, murder the crew, and then steal the cargo. Referring to illegal copying as piracy, even if you believe that the law is a right and moral law, is absurd.
If I were a pirate, I would be offended at people describing contract violations as piracy. That would belittle my entire career!
No, that's not theft, that's a contract violation. They are different things.
To steal something is to take it away by force or without permission. But if on monday, you are in posession of something, and on wednesday, you are still in posession of that thing, how can it have been stolen on tuesday? Many people believe that information cannot be a subject of property, as it has no physical reality. The nature of property is tied up in the fact that objects can only be in one place at a time. Information doesn't work that way.
Intellectual property is an oxymoron.
All that said, I would like to live in a world where artists get compensated for their work, so that there is more incentive for artists to produce art. However, I don't think we live in that world today: the people getting compensated are, by and large, not the artists, but their lawyers.
I hope someone can figure out a way for artists to truly get compensated. But trying to put the Napster toothpaste back in the tube just isn't going to work.
The world has changed. Figure out a way to live with it.
You are assuming that popular artists make a lot of money, and less popular artists make a little money, and things like MP3 will take money out of all of their pockets proportionally.
That's wrong.
The reality is that a handful of superstars make a lot of money, and all other artists make exactly nothing.
Small artists stand to benefit from free internet distribution of their music because it will get their music heard, since now they can go around the profit-sucking middlemen in the record labels.
This is not about artists losing money, this is about lawyers losing money.
Sit in limousine #74 and cry in his champagne?
It will be easier to take these anti-mp3 complaints seriously once we hear artists complaining who aren't already insanely rich! We're only hearing complaints from the people at the top of the food chain, who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
While this is generally true, that artists tend to have no control over their music after they sign a contract, in this case the article says that McCartney is the principal owner of MPL -- so it's his company that is filing suit.
So yes, in this case, it's fair to blame him.
It's more like an older laptop LCD display - you have to be more-or-less directly in front of the screen to read it, and the video is blurry if you move the mouse around quickly, scroll quickly, etc. The display is definitely not as good as the display you would get if you bought a new laptop today, for example. I don't think the screen is any relative of the nice $1500 flat-panel displays That's pretty much what I expected, but that's really fine with me, for a kiosk application. Of course, this begs the question: what's the cheapest 800x600 VGA flat-screen one can buy? I'm ok with a narrow viewing angle and slow refresh, but I want to be able to plug it in to a standard cheapo video card. The only flatscreens I've ever seen for sale have been high-end ones. Is there somewhere to buy low-end ones for cheap?
I need some small, cheap, durable Linux machines to use as web kiosks. It sounded like these I-Opener things might do the job nicely, once fitted with some manner of ethernet. But I guess not any more.
The thing that's killing me here is that I'd really like to have flat-screens, since real monitors are just too damned big. But you can't get a flat-screen for less than around $1500, which is way too expensive.
Is it possible to re-use just the flat-screen from these I-Opener devices? Can you just plug them in to another computer, or are they specialized hardware? Because an 800x600 flat-screen for $99 still sounds like a good deal to me.
Any other suggestions for how to do kiosks cheaply?
In particular, I want something that you stand in front of, and that doesn't take up a lot of floor space.
I agree it looks like crap, though. RealPlayer just doesn't have that much GUI (just a few menus and a preferences panel) so it would be easy to have both Motif and GTK versions of it. That's not where the majority of the code is.
SGI's X server kicks XFree's ass up and down the street. Not to disparage XFree: this is partly because the SGI X server itself is very, very good, but largely because SGI's graphics hardware is better than anything that you can buy in the PC world for love or money. I'm not talking about raw polygons/second in a full-screen window, I'm talking about use as a graphics-intensive desktop. There's nothing that compares to an O2, or even an Indy, as far as running an X desktop goes.
Do any of you know how I would go about obtaining the cabinet to a Cray X-MP? Not the computer, just the cabinet. You know, the one with a lovely built-in couch over the cooling unit. I've asked around, and I haven't gotten any good leads yet...
I thought it was an ok episode, in that the non-tech dialog made me laugh. (The tech dialog made me laugh too, but not in a good way.)
The fact that they didn't explain how virtual wounds became real, or where they vanished to, didn't really bother me, because this is the X Files after all: ghosts are real in their world, remember? They pulled similar tricks with the christmas episode with Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin... So presumably Jade is really a ghost that materialized through the game as some kind of frustration-avatar of the female hacker... (Didn't Gibson do a similar thing in Count Zero, with the Loa?)
The use of technology was pretty hard to take, though. But no worse than any other use of computers in tv or film. Of course, I completely loved Hackers, because it mostly didn't even try to be real: it was all abstract dream sequences, because watching someone hack is boring.
I thought the COPS episode was one of the funniest they've ever done! I got the feeling that a lot of it was improv: ``ok, go over there and question whoever answers the door...''
Funny, but not true.
Let's say you walk into a clothing store. Let's say they have the radio on. How many times do you think someone was charged for that?
Three times.
In theory, ASCAP/BMI pass this money on to the record label and thence the artist. In practice, only the top-grossing fraction of a percent of any artists ever see any of this money. Almost all artists never see a dime from this racket.
Here's a great article on this topic: ASCAP and BMI: Protectors of Artists or Shadowy Thieves?
(And I can't pass up an opportunity to link to this one again: Some of your friends are probably already this fucked. )
http://www.angelfire.com/punk/jello2000/
Sure, Al invented the Internet, and Tipper is one of the world's foremost free speech advocates, but can they really hold a candle to the man who wrote California Über Alles and Holiday in Cambodia?
Vote Jello!
So, I've got lots of ideas for what I want to do with the club, but I'm always looking for more. And I could certainly use some help!
If you or your company have expertise in audio and/or video webcasting, dealing with ASCAP/BMI, micro-radio, installing networks and computer systems in public places, computer-controlled video mixing and light shows, or anything along those lines, then send me mail! I'm at the stage of the game where I've got a lot of ideas, but I'm still trying to work out which ones are practical, which ones I can afford, and which ones I should do first.
I want to blur the line between real-world and web communities: I want the physical space to be hooked in to the net in a way that hasn't been done before. Most nightclubs, even those that do webcasts, are still just a room, a bar, and a sound system. I want to go beyond that, and make something new.
If you're interested in helping out, or even if you just have suggestions, let me know! What would you like to see? What do you think would move the concept of ``nightclub'' to a new level?
Please don't think of this as an ``internet cafe'' kind of deal: in my experience internet cafes aren't even cafes, what they are is terminal rooms or photocopy stores that happen to sell espresso. What I'm building will definitely be a nightclub, with a lot of live music. But it will also be a web radio station, a web music zine, and a heavily wired physical space.
Help me build it! I think it's going to be a lot of fun...