And yet if you write a sufficiently popular book you can be sure that people will lend their copy to their friends, many times over ; that your book will find its way, scanned, on the internet and that essentially many people will read it for free.
This is also the reality. Somehow this is not all bad because all of this will enhance your popularity, and you'll likely make more money on the next book. Perhaps, if you are lucky, people will queue to actually buy your book as it comes available in the stores.
It is true that the people who read your book for free did it without your permission, but it is also true that what they did was not necessarily reprehensible or even immoral. Have you never read a book for free? What about libraries? should they be banned too?
To prevent the reading-books-for-free phenomenon would be extremely difficult and probably bad for the society as a whole, including the authors.
It's not as clear cut as you make it. I think copyright holders have to accept a degree of "lost" income in return for some intangibles. How much is a matter for debate.
Well, there are places in the world today such as modern Russia where it is perfectly legal to copy and distribute just about any work without royalty. This is how allofmp3.com works, btw, perfectly legally.
There were places in the past such as 19th century and early 20th centure USA, of all places, which had no copyright law. That's why Charles Dickens was so unhappy about the US because he couldn't get any money from the US market. People would just copy his new books and sell them there without any kind of royalty paid to him.
Even the early works of Tolkien got copied under similar circumstances by an American publishing house without any royalty to Tolkien. He complains about it in his "authorised" edition.
Copyright law is not natural law. In those places and others there exists or there existed a pretty much unlimited "right to copy".
In the modern USA there exists a limited right to copy even copyrighted works, for fair use reasons.
All of this is revolving around the needs of big business. Now that there is significant business regarding the quick and easy trade of material, the sale of quite expensive items such as mp3 players or divx consoles, sales to be made from internet connections and monthly download bills, don't you think there is a bit of hypocrisy going around?
Sony and Apple would like both the businesses of selling various bits of equipments such as computers and players *and* the sale of material. How this is going to be resolved is left as an exercise to the reader, but I wouldn't hold the current copyright laws as sacred and untouchable.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
The word you are looking for is "calibration". It doesn't really matter if you are working in RGB or CYMK, they are both equivalent colour spaces. What does matter is whether the colour you see on screen is calibrated to what the printer can produce.
This bit isn't done under Linux. Photoshop does it on Windows. AFAIK on Macs, the system itself does it, i.e. a native OS/X version of the Gimp might be able to produce calibrated colours relatively easily.
As with real people, holding a grudge with a company is unproductive. If Adobe decides that Linux is viable and starts porting their software to this platform, then this is great news.
I'd certainly buy some Adobe products for Linux. Probably not photoshop, but certainly Illustrator.
Since about the days of NT4.0 many people in the IT business were saying something along the line: "MS got their act together, they have released a professional O/S with security built-in, a reasonable kernel, good performance, that runs on multiple platforms including commodity hardware. This is the end of UNIX, and not a moment too soon, we are tired of the expensive hardware and of the Unix wars".
However MS has continually disappointed. Security ended up being very very bad, and becoming in fact worse with every new release (Microsoft still hasn't been able to break the old conflict between ease-of-use and security, unlike Apple).
Since then we've had Linux and the BSDs maturing (including Darwin). MS security is in fact worse with XP than it ever was with NT4 and this is affecting mere users in a huge way. Spyware removal has moved from a little cottage industry to big multinational business. Running a simple PC with Windows is fast becoming harder and more labour intensive than simply installing Linux on it.
My family members and friends are constantly asking me for advice. I'm always happy to help them with their Windows troubles (after all this keeps my skills up to date to a degree). I never mention the fact that they should try Linux or buy and Apple but when they ask me why I don't run Windows I simply say: "no spyware, no virus" and they start thinking about it. A few more years of Linux and OpenOffice maturing, and we'll see a shift of the order of the Firefox one.
Unless Microsoft get their act together, fast. But they are not, witness the current decision.
Microsoft is unable to make long term decisions that will affect their users positively. This is because they are driven by short-term profits. Even thought they have the resources 10 times over to make the right decisions, they are being trounced, little by little, by a band of volunteers.
This is both heartening and disheartening.
BTW I find all the replies to remarks along the line "but you can't even plug a windows machine in default mode to the Internet more than 10 minutes before becoming infected" absolutely hilarious.
1- first find a secure machine 2- download all the patches by hand 3- burn to CD 4- go to insecure machine. 5- unplug from network 6- install OS 7- install patches 8- boot 9- make sure firewall is on 10- plug network cable in. Browse to you heart's content! 11- Oh, and make sure you don't run IE, and keep your machine up-to-date! and don't run as the admin! What? games don't run except as admin? don't play games!
You should get hired by Id Software and tell them how to write their games. I'm sure they'll listen with great interest given how crummy their developers seemed to be.
Doom3 will only install *and* run as an admin. Many recent games are in the same boat. You can use the 'run as' trick, of course, but this doesn't change the fact that you need to be running some code as an admin all the freaking time.
Most users will give up (`run as' is not very user-friendly) and run as the local admin all the time. Most home users run games.
You do the maths. Why is it that games developers come to the conclusion that they need admin rights all the time, I don't know, but something in the system design must force them to go down that route, unfortunately for all of us.
All you are saying about union is simply gross over-generalization. There are productive unions, which are nothing less and nothing more than democratic entities representing the workers.
Think of this: the only meager workers right you've got in the US got instituted thanks to unions. In most western countries workers have more rights than in the US (in particular more holidays), this does not stop workers from being actually as productive or more than US workers.
There are abusive unions just as there are abusive companies. However the purpose of unions is to make the workplace as livable as possible so that workers are as productive as possible.
The days of highly paid, rare, competent, expert IT professionals are numbered. Soon programmers will not be treated differently than workers on assembly lines, because IT skills will be widespread and cheaply available. In this context there is a vast potential for abuse, just like in the EA case.
In the EA case the company was being sadistic and actually unproductive. It should be possible to to demonstrate that from the point of view of the worker to upper management without risking being fired. The person who needed to be fired was the boss who was demanding totally unreasonable working hours from his staff.
This is where unions come in. The union conducts the negotiation in such a way that no one single worker has his/her job on the line and a reasonable compromised is arived at.
Instead a spouse got online and various forums got involved. It was enough bad PR from EA that they had to do something about it. Be absolutely certain that very similar abuse take place in the industry without anyone looking at it. The spouse's reaction is not something to rely on.
Now she is setting up something that very much resembles what unions would do. I applaud. Good luck to all involved. A union-like non-profit organisation is clearly the long-term solution here.
On the contrary, according to Mandelbrot most things in nature conform to some degree to the fractal pattern. In fact measuring the fractal dimension of anything from mountains to paintings nearly always returns a non-integer result, thereby highlighting the fractal nature of most non-artificial or ideal things.
This realisation was what was important. Now fractal theory doesn't allow to do much with the resulting knowledge, except precisely quantifying with high accuracy this degree of fractalness, which is useful in some contexts.
For example a benign skin lesion will have a contour with a lower fractal dimension than a melanoma. You can use this information for computer-assisted diagnosis.
Whereas the US is of course a heaven of reason, tolerance and goodwill, where everyone regardless of their race, creed or birth is treated with the same respect and given the same chances to share in the American Dream.
Give me a break. Having lived (not just travelled) in many countries including the US it seems to me that the problems experienced in Europe right now because of immigration are not in any way worse than those happening in most American cities. In fact the violent crime rate in Europe is still 10% of what it is in the US.
Essentially you are correct in saying that the situation in the colonies around the world just after WWII set the stage for more bloody conflict.
However all the colonial powers have a share in the responsibility, not just France.
Also don't forget that in many instances of war of independance the US and the colonial powers were in face allies. This is the case for both Algeria and Indochina. The US were mortally afraid that communist regimes would emerge should the colonial power withdraw. In the case of Indochina and Algeria this is what happened in fact.
Remember that Ho-Chi-Minh first asked the US for help for getting rid of the French, but that the US administration turned him down. So the US must shoulder a part of the blame as well.
Finally conservatively the US killed 3 millions in Viet-Nam. I wouldn't want to start bandying around death tolls and getting into a dispute of which is the worst killer state.
> The U.S. does not want to be the world's policeman.
Oh, absolutely. The US is absolutely 100% not keen on spending any money or risking their troops' lives for any reason, except when something happens which may threaten America's influence in any part of the world, thereby possibly having economical repercussion for them.
FYI the US has bombed 26 countries since 1945. The US is the most warlike country in existence today by any measure you can care to mention.
You know what? good for Russia. The ol' US of A used to be the biggest IP thief in history around the times of Charles Dickens. Have a read at this.
Having no IP protection to speak off (including patents) was a great way to exploit other countries works of arts and inventions without having to pay for royalties. For a while it helped make the US what it is now: the richest country in the world by far.
For the last 50 years or so the US have turned around and want to make everyone pay through the nose for Hollywood films, pop music, brand-name drugs and sport shoes.
It's only fair that the US and the West in general gets a taste of it's own medicine. I feel for the RIAA but I won't be so sad if it flounders and goes away. Music will not stop. If worse comes to worse you can always make your own or go to a local concert.
It depends on how you define "best programmer ever". Sure it is very impressive that he offered a geometrically progressing bounty for every bug in TeX and Metafont but he had to cap it eventually and wrote a lot of cheques. Allegedly he would have a big hole in his bank account if everyone Knuth wrote a cheque to decided to cash them instead of hanging them on their wall.
Also if you have tried to program in TeX itself (as opposed to simply use) you may decide that whereas Knuth is a great programmer and an excellent writer he is not a beautiful language designer. By far.
I've recently moved from Australia to France. There they have a system they call ADSL2 that delivers 15 Mbits/s over standard telephone lines, and the first provider (www.free.fr) delivers video over IP for free over this. You get all the free-to-air channels plus some. You just plug your TV on the router they provide (for free) and off you go. There is no configuration.
This is for 30 Euros/month (US$40 approx). Oh and it does free voice over IP too. Last time I was in France they still had this 1980's era minitel, but things have changed a bit since in the last couple of years.
For that price in Australia you can't even get 512 kbits/s.
What's the situation in the US? At least in big cities there should be some comparable offerings, no?
I can't believe the amount of falsehoods you are writing.
1-Nobody says you have to use a single repository under CVS. Different trees, different users, different rights. mix and match.
2-You can set up your system so they don't have access to the repository file system using the network code.
I'm an extremely heavy user of CVS and have been for years. I've never come across the so-called problems that you describe.
Moreoever evidently people who believe a particular piece of code needs to be rewritten will try at any opportunity to say that the old code is tripe. That doesn't make it true.
Finally openCVS is being written because of a license issue, not because the basic concepts or even the implementation of the current GPLed CVS are a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet if you write a sufficiently popular book you can be sure that people will lend their copy to their friends, many times over ; that your book will find its way, scanned, on the internet and that essentially many people will read it for free.
This is also the reality. Somehow this is not all bad because all of this will enhance your popularity, and you'll likely make more money on the next book. Perhaps, if you are lucky, people will queue to actually buy your book as it comes available in the stores.
It is true that the people who read your book for free did it without your permission, but it is also true that what they did was not necessarily reprehensible or even immoral. Have you never read a book for free? What about libraries? should they be banned too?
To prevent the reading-books-for-free phenomenon would be extremely difficult and probably bad for the society as a whole, including the authors.
It's not as clear cut as you make it. I think copyright holders have to accept a degree of "lost" income in return for some intangibles. How much is a matter for debate.
Well, there are places in the world today such as modern Russia where it is perfectly legal to copy and distribute just about any work without royalty. This is how allofmp3.com works, btw, perfectly legally.
There were places in the past such as 19th century and early 20th centure USA, of all places, which had no copyright law. That's why Charles Dickens was so unhappy about the US because he couldn't get any money from the US market. People would just copy his new books and sell them there without any kind of royalty paid to him.
Even the early works of Tolkien got copied under similar circumstances by an American publishing house without any royalty to Tolkien. He complains about it in his "authorised" edition.
Copyright law is not natural law. In those places and others there exists or there existed a pretty much unlimited "right to copy".
In the modern USA there exists a limited right to copy even copyrighted works, for fair use reasons.
All of this is revolving around the needs of big business. Now that there is significant business regarding the quick and easy trade of material, the sale of quite expensive items such as mp3 players or divx consoles, sales to be made from internet connections and monthly download bills, don't you think there is a bit of hypocrisy going around?
Sony and Apple would like both the businesses of selling various bits of equipments such as computers and players *and* the sale of material. How this is going to be resolved is left as an exercise to the reader, but I wouldn't hold the current copyright laws as sacred and untouchable.
I hope this answers your request.
Are we going to compare industries in WallMarts now?
I.e:
the movie industry: 0.1 WM
the game industry: 0.05 WM (tiny!)
Microsoft: 0.2 WM (ha!)
GDP of Greece: 0.9 WM
Look up logorrhea (yes it's a real word).
And Macs.
The word you are looking for is "calibration". It doesn't really matter if you are working in RGB or CYMK, they are both equivalent colour spaces. What does matter is whether the colour you see on screen is calibrated to what the printer can produce.
This bit isn't done under Linux. Photoshop does it on Windows. AFAIK on Macs, the system itself does it, i.e. a native OS/X version of the Gimp might be able to produce calibrated colours relatively easily.
As with real people, holding a grudge with a company is unproductive. If Adobe decides that Linux is viable and starts porting their software to this platform, then this is great news.
I'd certainly buy some Adobe products for Linux. Probably not photoshop, but certainly Illustrator.
Since about the days of NT4.0 many people in the IT business were saying something along the line: "MS got their act together, they have released a professional O/S with security built-in, a reasonable kernel, good performance, that runs on multiple platforms including commodity hardware. This is the end of UNIX, and not a moment too soon, we are tired of the expensive hardware and of the Unix wars".
However MS has continually disappointed. Security ended up being very very bad, and becoming in fact worse with every new release (Microsoft still hasn't been able to break the old conflict between ease-of-use and security, unlike Apple).
Since then we've had Linux and the BSDs maturing (including Darwin). MS security is in fact worse with XP than it ever was with NT4 and this is affecting mere users in a huge way. Spyware removal has moved from a little cottage industry to big multinational business. Running a simple PC with Windows is fast becoming harder and more labour intensive than simply installing Linux on it.
My family members and friends are constantly asking me for advice. I'm always happy to help them with their Windows troubles (after all this keeps my skills up to date to a degree). I never mention the fact that they should try Linux or buy and Apple but when they ask me why I don't run Windows I simply say: "no spyware, no virus" and they start thinking about it. A few more years of Linux and OpenOffice maturing, and we'll see a shift of the order of the Firefox one.
Unless Microsoft get their act together, fast. But they are not, witness the current decision.
Microsoft is unable to make long term decisions that will affect their users positively. This is because they are driven by short-term profits. Even thought they have the resources 10 times over to make the right decisions, they are being trounced, little by little, by a band of volunteers.
This is both heartening and disheartening.
BTW I find all the replies to remarks along the line "but you can't even plug a windows machine in default mode to the Internet more than 10 minutes before becoming infected" absolutely hilarious.
1- first find a secure machine
2- download all the patches by hand
3- burn to CD
4- go to insecure machine.
5- unplug from network
6- install OS
7- install patches
8- boot
9- make sure firewall is on
10- plug network cable in. Browse to you heart's content!
11- Oh, and make sure you don't run IE, and keep your machine up-to-date! and don't run as the admin! What? games don't run except as admin? don't play games!
Easy! speaks for itself, doesn't it?
You should get hired by Id Software and tell them how to write their games. I'm sure they'll listen with great interest given how crummy their developers seemed to be.
Doom3 will only install *and* run as an admin. Many recent games are in the same boat. You can use the 'run as' trick, of course, but this doesn't change the fact that you need to be running some code as an admin all the freaking time.
Most users will give up (`run as' is not very user-friendly) and run as the local admin all the time. Most home users run games.
You do the maths. Why is it that games developers come to the conclusion that they need admin rights all the time, I don't know, but something in the system design must force them to go down that route, unfortunately for all of us.
Yes, coward, you are a real genius. Most users, by far, don't know or don't want to know what a firewall is.
The more obnoxious Microsoft (a renowned cash-strapped company if there is one), the better the alternatives look.
All you are saying about union is simply gross over-generalization. There are productive unions, which are nothing less and nothing more than democratic entities representing the workers.
Think of this: the only meager workers right you've got in the US got instituted thanks to unions. In most western countries workers have more rights than in the US (in particular more holidays), this does not stop workers from being actually as productive or more than US workers.
There are abusive unions just as there are abusive companies. However the purpose of unions is to make the workplace as livable as possible so that workers are as productive as possible.
The days of highly paid, rare, competent, expert IT professionals are numbered. Soon programmers will not be treated differently than workers on assembly lines, because IT skills will be widespread and cheaply available. In this context there is a vast potential for abuse, just like in the EA case.
In the EA case the company was being sadistic and actually unproductive. It should be possible to to demonstrate that from the point of view of the worker to upper management without risking being fired. The person who needed to be fired was the boss who was demanding totally unreasonable working hours from his staff.
This is where unions come in. The union conducts the negotiation in such a way that no one single worker has his/her job on the line and a reasonable compromised is arived at.
Instead a spouse got online and various forums got involved. It was enough bad PR from EA that they had to do something about it. Be absolutely certain that very similar abuse take place in the industry without anyone looking at it. The spouse's reaction is not something to rely on.
Now she is setting up something that very much resembles what unions would do. I applaud. Good luck to all involved. A union-like non-profit organisation is clearly the long-term solution here.
On the contrary, according to Mandelbrot most things in nature conform to some degree to the fractal pattern. In fact measuring the fractal dimension of anything from mountains to paintings nearly always returns a non-integer result, thereby highlighting the fractal nature of most non-artificial or ideal things.
This realisation was what was important. Now fractal theory doesn't allow to do much with the resulting knowledge, except precisely quantifying with high accuracy this degree of fractalness, which is useful in some contexts.
For example a benign skin lesion will have a contour with a lower fractal dimension than a melanoma. You can use this information for computer-assisted diagnosis.
Whereas the US is of course a heaven of reason, tolerance and goodwill, where everyone regardless of their race, creed or birth is treated with the same respect and given the same chances to share in the American Dream.
Give me a break. Having lived (not just travelled) in many countries including the US it seems to me that the problems experienced in Europe right now because of immigration are not in any way worse than those happening in most American cities. In fact the violent crime rate in Europe is still 10% of what it is in the US.
Essentially you are correct in saying that the situation in the colonies around the world just after WWII set the stage for more bloody conflict.
However all the colonial powers have a share in the responsibility, not just France.
Also don't forget that in many instances of war of independance the US and the colonial powers were in face allies. This is the case for both Algeria and Indochina. The US were mortally afraid that communist regimes would emerge should the colonial power withdraw. In the case of Indochina and Algeria this is what happened in fact.
Remember that Ho-Chi-Minh first asked the US for help for getting rid of the French, but that the US administration turned him down. So the US must shoulder a part of the blame as well.
Finally conservatively the US killed 3 millions in Viet-Nam. I wouldn't want to start bandying around death tolls and getting into a dispute of which is the worst killer state.
> The U.S. does not want to be the world's policeman.
Oh, absolutely. The US is absolutely 100% not keen on spending any money or risking their troops' lives for any reason, except when something happens which may threaten America's influence in any part of the world, thereby possibly having economical repercussion for them.
FYI the US has bombed 26 countries since 1945. The US is the most warlike country in existence today by any measure you can care to mention.
You know what? good for Russia. The ol' US of A used to be the biggest IP thief in history around the times of Charles Dickens. Have a read at this.
Having no IP protection to speak off (including patents) was a great way to exploit other countries works of arts and inventions without having to pay for royalties. For a while it helped make the US what it is now: the richest country in the world by far.
For the last 50 years or so the US have turned around and want to make everyone pay through the nose for Hollywood films, pop music, brand-name drugs and sport shoes.
It's only fair that the US and the West in general gets a taste of it's own medicine. I feel for the RIAA but I won't be so sad if it flounders and goes away. Music will not stop. If worse comes to worse you can always make your own or go to a local concert.
It depends on how you define "best programmer ever". Sure it is very impressive that he offered a geometrically progressing bounty for every bug in TeX and Metafont but he had to cap it eventually and wrote a lot of cheques. Allegedly he would have a big hole in his bank account if everyone Knuth wrote a cheque to decided to cash them instead of hanging them on their wall.
Also if you have tried to program in TeX itself (as opposed to simply use) you may decide that whereas Knuth is a great programmer and an excellent writer he is not a beautiful language designer. By far.
Clearly we're all moving at near lightspeed relative to distant quasars.
Yes GPS gives you a 3D coordinate (intersection of 3 spheres), so it does give you your altitude as well.
One word: spies.
I've recently moved from Australia to France. There they have a system they call ADSL2 that delivers 15 Mbits/s over standard telephone lines, and the first provider (www.free.fr) delivers video over IP for free over this. You get all the free-to-air channels plus some. You just plug your TV on the router they provide (for free) and off you go. There is no configuration.
This is for 30 Euros/month (US$40 approx). Oh and it does free voice over IP too. Last time I was in France they still had this 1980's era minitel, but things have changed a bit since in the last couple of years.
For that price in Australia you can't even get 512 kbits/s.
What's the situation in the US? At least in big cities there should be some comparable offerings, no?
Still no fair use clause in Australia. We did end up with the worst of both worlds.
I can't believe the amount of falsehoods you are writing.
1-Nobody says you have to use a single repository under CVS. Different trees, different users, different rights. mix and match.
2-You can set up your system so they don't have access to the repository file system using the network code.
I'm an extremely heavy user of CVS and have been for years. I've never come across the so-called problems that you describe.
Moreoever evidently people who believe a particular piece of code needs to be rewritten will try at any opportunity to say that the old code is tripe. That doesn't make it true.
Finally openCVS is being written because of a license issue, not because the basic concepts or even the implementation of the current GPLed CVS are a problem.
Have you read and understood the gpl licence?
> What if you want to use a modified CVS to track
> configuration changes in a non-open source
> application? Oops! Can't do that with GPL'd CVS
Of course you can as long as you don't try to sell or otherwise distribute your modified version of CVS.
Modification of GPL sources for personal or internal use is permitted.
Have you actually used CVS?
> If you have access to the CVS repository, you
> can do anything with it... What if I'm not
> qualified to work in certain trees?
Of course you can restrict things any old way you want using basic UNIX permissions. Give your users various groups and you are set to go.