Graphics is no longer Apple's only "core market". The purchase of NeXt has brought a lot of Unix fans into the fold. So you have the artists and designers of Classic vintage as well as a whole generation of people that don't feel like writing a batch file full of gotos when they want to shell script on desktop box. Apple's niche is a huge swath of the most influential members of the information tech community. Photoshop isn't going anywhere, and niether are the masses of new converts Apple is gaining each month for a variety of other reasons. They don't need to buy Adobe for this to be the case.
So true. I found that my college environment actually stifled my true learning, because the mediocrity embracing fill-in-the-blanks assignments got in the way of real learning, and the mediocrity-worshipping faculty and thereby empowered average students created an environment in which I didn't feel excited about excelling.
This (pay wall past intro) is an interesting article I read in Scientific American about a plan to recycle much of what is currently considered nuclear waste for use in advanced fast breeder reactors. It seems the most feasible alternative to oil I have seen.
The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone? -- Eben Moglen
Let people pay what they can afford. If you get the sharks out of the pool, it will work out.
Non lethal, more dangerous to liberty
on
Set PHASRs On Stun
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· Score: 3, Insightful
When they can control a protesting crowd by incapacitating everyone in it, they have another tool of control that won't bring the backlash of actually killing people. I'd almost prefer that their only option was a lethal one.
The problem is that every use by the people is crammed into a narrow window of crap spectrum. If frequencies currently licensed exclusively and wastefully for broadcast could instead be shared, this wouldn't be as big a problem. Not allocating spectrum to media corporations over the citizenry does not mean total chaos.
Joe Sixpacks and PHBs will die eventually, and they'll be replaced by an ever-growing percentage of technically savvy youth. As ignorance of technology wanes, so too does Microsoft. They rely on consumer ignorance, like all of the intellectual "property" cartels... you'll see.
Entertainment is for consumers... and in my book "consumer" is an ugly word. Maybe with the hawkers of mindless garbage so up in arms about that garbage being copied, people will use their own creativity instead of passively gobbling what big media slops out for them. I'm no friend to DRM, but I don't give much money to these companies anyway.
One of my favorite examples of this is SimCity, where you are supposedly free to create a city after your own vision. But somehow, all the cities end up looking like Los Angeles, because the game adopts the modern view of urban design that attractive cities can be built by laying out swaths of color and massive collector roads. Is it any wonder it was so hard to get mass transit to work effectively?
People will pay for information, but increasingly, the quality will have to go up and the price will go down. The coercion model of culture sales will not last... and the existing industrial model is terribly suited for anything else. In its place will rise many iTunes-esque venues, where the distance between our money and the musicians pockets is minimized. iTunes is still too expensive to compete against the growing ubiquity of digital communication. Only by cutting out the fat can prices fall enough to continue to convince people not to share information with one another and instead pay for it. But as iTunes shows, enough people will be honest and pay, but only if they are asked an honest price. For me, 99 cents for a whole album, DRM-free, will convince me to pay. Until then, let them try and stop me from listening to 1's and 0's. They can't.
Is it possible that avoiding municipal wireless access will eventually lead to a freer society? If broadband access remains expensive, perhaps this will drive mesh networks later on and a drive for free digitally-used spectrum. In that case, there's no ISP that they can track down in order to subpoena your address when you share information. Will keeping things locked down eventually stimulate grassroots networking?
Isn't Microsoft benevolent for granting its customers all of these abilities? Almost like an SUV that automatically flips itself upright after overturning due to manufacturer defects. Spyware removal software is the ultimate in ugly hacks... it is a band aid, not an ability.
The problem with MS and many fallen technology companies that have gone before it is that the niche to which their entire business model is tailored is gradually being eroded by forces beyond their control. The desktop computer is becoming less important a player in the computing landscape as the true spirit of Moore's law, that equivalently complex chips are becoming exponentially cheaper, begins to drive computing into more specialized devices. On the other side of things, networking technologies are pushing important applications in the other direction to servers. The fortress that MS engineered for itself, the fortress on which their business model depends, is going to be a liability as the definition of computer and computing changes.
Information is made out of electronic ones and zeroes... nothing, air. The sooner we realize that information cannot be stolen but only shared, the sooner we can all get on with innovating and benefitting from the fact that the paradigm has shifted. All this bickering is over laws designed for an era in which the manufacturing of information, in the form of physical artifacts, needed to be protected due to the equipment and distribution costs... wake up folks. You can't manufacture air. The laws designed to promote that manufacture are now barriers, not to dumb people leeching movies, but to creative people seeking to recombine movies, audio, text, etc into new work. The right to make money by restricting others' freedom of information was only invented to protect the industrial process of printing. We don't need to grant that "right" anymore by taking away everyone else's rights. Copyright is becoming the tool of people that are desperately irrelevant right now... as irrelevant as the Catholic Church was becoming when people could read their own copies of the Bible. We have a universal network here... a perfect way to create and distribute culture to one another. Lets abolish the restrictions... I promise you, creativity will not disappear.
Seriously. America seems especially bad with it's anti intellectualism. I go to USC, and the students seem to pride themselves on having zero opinions or interests that might be viewed as uncool. Even the "good students" play along with the ruse, studying hard and yet denying it out the other side of their mouths... interest is viewed as a social liability.
With computers it has always been especially bad. I was quite surprised in Germany when I was working in a bar on my PowerBook and a few tables over was a beautiful girl on an identical mac, writing Flash ActionScript code. I ended up talking to her about Lisp, and to my amazement, she was actually really interested! Southern California had taught me never to mention my interest in anything related to computers in social situations. But in Germany, it never seemed to be such a problem.
Can you imagine if people treated general literacy like computer literacy. "Oh, hehe, I can't read a thing." People don't get that information technology is about to turn the world on its head and that they might as well be saying they can't read.
Slashdot Mirror
Graphics is no longer Apple's only "core market". The purchase of NeXt has brought a lot of Unix fans into the fold. So you have the artists and designers of Classic vintage as well as a whole generation of people that don't feel like writing a batch file full of gotos when they want to shell script on desktop box. Apple's niche is a huge swath of the most influential members of the information tech community. Photoshop isn't going anywhere, and niether are the masses of new converts Apple is gaining each month for a variety of other reasons. They don't need to buy Adobe for this to be the case.
So true. I found that my college environment actually stifled my true learning, because the mediocrity embracing fill-in-the-blanks assignments got in the way of real learning, and the mediocrity-worshipping faculty and thereby empowered average students created an environment in which I didn't feel excited about excelling.
This (pay wall past intro) is an interesting article I read in Scientific American about a plan to recycle much of what is currently considered nuclear waste for use in advanced fast breeder reactors. It seems the most feasible alternative to oil I have seen.
Wouldn't that kill the farmer's crops?
The Microsoft solution to the Microsoft solution to the Microsoft solution to the Microsoft solution to the...
The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone? -- Eben Moglen Let people pay what they can afford. If you get the sharks out of the pool, it will work out.
I hope they don't escape.
When they can control a protesting crowd by incapacitating everyone in it, they have another tool of control that won't bring the backlash of actually killing people. I'd almost prefer that their only option was a lethal one.
These analogies are made because people are trying to fit a square artistic peg into a round commodity hole. Bad analogies are the result.
The problem is that every use by the people is crammed into a narrow window of crap spectrum. If frequencies currently licensed exclusively and wastefully for broadcast could instead be shared, this wouldn't be as big a problem. Not allocating spectrum to media corporations over the citizenry does not mean total chaos.
Sure would be nice to see some screenshots immediately apparent... it's all text.
Something else... This is the company that bought it... still alive and horrible
Joe Sixpacks and PHBs will die eventually, and they'll be replaced by an ever-growing percentage of technically savvy youth. As ignorance of technology wanes, so too does Microsoft. They rely on consumer ignorance, like all of the intellectual "property" cartels... you'll see.
Entertainment is for consumers... and in my book "consumer" is an ugly word. Maybe with the hawkers of mindless garbage so up in arms about that garbage being copied, people will use their own creativity instead of passively gobbling what big media slops out for them. I'm no friend to DRM, but I don't give much money to these companies anyway.
One of my favorite examples of this is SimCity, where you are supposedly free to create a city after your own vision. But somehow, all the cities end up looking like Los Angeles, because the game adopts the modern view of urban design that attractive cities can be built by laying out swaths of color and massive collector roads. Is it any wonder it was so hard to get mass transit to work effectively?
Looking at the screenshot of MS's tab hack, I have to wonder how web sites look through a horizontal slit.
People will pay for information, but increasingly, the quality will have to go up and the price will go down. The coercion model of culture sales will not last... and the existing industrial model is terribly suited for anything else. In its place will rise many iTunes-esque venues, where the distance between our money and the musicians pockets is minimized. iTunes is still too expensive to compete against the growing ubiquity of digital communication. Only by cutting out the fat can prices fall enough to continue to convince people not to share information with one another and instead pay for it. But as iTunes shows, enough people will be honest and pay, but only if they are asked an honest price. For me, 99 cents for a whole album, DRM-free, will convince me to pay. Until then, let them try and stop me from listening to 1's and 0's. They can't.
They're going to need to shut down the remaining public libraries now too. Can't have good Texans getting too much information.
Is it possible that avoiding municipal wireless access will eventually lead to a freer society? If broadband access remains expensive, perhaps this will drive mesh networks later on and a drive for free digitally-used spectrum. In that case, there's no ISP that they can track down in order to subpoena your address when you share information. Will keeping things locked down eventually stimulate grassroots networking?
Isn't Microsoft benevolent for granting its customers all of these abilities? Almost like an SUV that automatically flips itself upright after overturning due to manufacturer defects. Spyware removal software is the ultimate in ugly hacks... it is a band aid, not an ability.
The problem with MS and many fallen technology companies that have gone before it is that the niche to which their entire business model is tailored is gradually being eroded by forces beyond their control. The desktop computer is becoming less important a player in the computing landscape as the true spirit of Moore's law, that equivalently complex chips are becoming exponentially cheaper, begins to drive computing into more specialized devices. On the other side of things, networking technologies are pushing important applications in the other direction to servers. The fortress that MS engineered for itself, the fortress on which their business model depends, is going to be a liability as the definition of computer and computing changes.
Information is made out of electronic ones and zeroes... nothing, air. The sooner we realize that information cannot be stolen but only shared, the sooner we can all get on with innovating and benefitting from the fact that the paradigm has shifted. All this bickering is over laws designed for an era in which the manufacturing of information, in the form of physical artifacts, needed to be protected due to the equipment and distribution costs... wake up folks. You can't manufacture air. The laws designed to promote that manufacture are now barriers, not to dumb people leeching movies, but to creative people seeking to recombine movies, audio, text, etc into new work. The right to make money by restricting others' freedom of information was only invented to protect the industrial process of printing. We don't need to grant that "right" anymore by taking away everyone else's rights. Copyright is becoming the tool of people that are desperately irrelevant right now... as irrelevant as the Catholic Church was becoming when people could read their own copies of the Bible. We have a universal network here... a perfect way to create and distribute culture to one another. Lets abolish the restrictions... I promise you, creativity will not disappear.
If we can't look to systemic inequity and a shitty educaction system as the source of a crime problem, it must be the video games. America is lost.
I claim a huge elegance hole in Java.
Seriously. America seems especially bad with it's anti intellectualism. I go to USC, and the students seem to pride themselves on having zero opinions or interests that might be viewed as uncool. Even the "good students" play along with the ruse, studying hard and yet denying it out the other side of their mouths... interest is viewed as a social liability. With computers it has always been especially bad. I was quite surprised in Germany when I was working in a bar on my PowerBook and a few tables over was a beautiful girl on an identical mac, writing Flash ActionScript code. I ended up talking to her about Lisp, and to my amazement, she was actually really interested! Southern California had taught me never to mention my interest in anything related to computers in social situations. But in Germany, it never seemed to be such a problem. Can you imagine if people treated general literacy like computer literacy. "Oh, hehe, I can't read a thing." People don't get that information technology is about to turn the world on its head and that they might as well be saying they can't read.