As far as I can tell, the free reading of books has been a part of western civilization since writing was invented, and books were scrolls. Yes, there have been private libraries where you paid a fee, or had have to be a student at a university, or some other type of member, etc.
What's your source? Literacy was always the badge of the elite: of citizens in Greece (wealthy men only), clergy in the middle ages, etc. It's only been relatively recently that universal literacy has been a goal, and only in parts of the world.
Likewise, in an increasingly literate and wealthy society, public libraries are less important. At one time they were the only way for most people to get books, now they are mostly just a (taxpayer-subsidized) cheaper alternative.
In an increasingly wealthy society, they should try to fit a modern niche. There are subscription libraries for certain types of specialized information. This is a great idea for those who want to share the cost of many $14,000 subscriptions, for a $20 per month fee.
If you buy a lamp, for example, there is nothing preventing you from making thousands of other lamps just like it provided you can do so [and you don't pretend your lamp is made by anyone but yourself].
Sure, there's something preventing you from doing that: a patent.
Look at all the products out there with a patent on some critical piece of them. You cannot copy and distribute those products either.
It's in good editorial hands, and the community produces some great material for it. I think it's a great fit for the Perl community [such little as I've seen of it].
So, if EarthWeb doesn't want it, perhaps O'Reilly would like to break into periodical publishing. C'mon, Tim, you know you want to!
However, I think that a focus on how GNU-compliant the software is doesn't help anyone: let's work to make this the best mail client available anywhere, period! [Emphasis mine.]
And just how are we to 'work to make this' anything if it's not free software? Don't like Miguel's focus? Grab the sources and start hacking. Can't write code? Get some cash together and pay a bunch of hackers to make it what you want.
If it wasn't GNU-compliant, you wouldn't be able to take the "let's make it x" attitude at all.
In contrast to your thought that having the software be free helps no one, I think it helps anyone--anyone who wants to take advantage of it.
Your post reads like more armchair quarterbacking than anything else.
I credit tetris with popularizing the whole genre of puzzle games. It spawned more clones than any other game I can think of, due to it's simplicity and addictiveness.
I'm not surprised it didn't make this list. The list wasn't a survey of PC gaming, so much as a subset of PC gaming for the teenage boys who comprise the most avid members.
I got the static binary tarball. Unpacked and tried it on SuSE 7.0.
Game runs; looks good. Spacebar for fire doesn't work. Hmm... Two minutes into play, X just dies and kdm restarts it. Hmm...
Same thing happens next time, except it's not just X. The machine spontaneously reboots. Wow. I've never been able to do that on my linux machines, no matter how many flailing pointers I've dereferenced.:-)
I may try this later, when someone else finds a stable configuration.
You mean to tell me that an outgoing president is advocating huge spending in the last months of his term? Incredible! He's setting expectations that his Republican successor may find it hard to follow? Unthinkable!
The next thing you know, he'll be pardoning every friend of his party in the slammer and pushing through a bunch of legislation, just before he leaves.
Oh yeah, I forgot, that's what every outbound president does these days. Why be surprised?
RMS doesn't have too much power, because he can't compel anyone to apply a new license to their software.
In a sense, can't the GNU project do exactly that? There's a clause I have always wondered about in the standard template people copy into their files to signify that it is GPLed. The interesting phrase is what version you can use:
...either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Most people just copy and paste this into their programs. But what if version 3 of the GPL has some big deficiencies? What if RMS dies, and his evil half-brother tkaes over the FSF and starts adding in exemption clauses that let distributed sources be kept closed?
IANAL, and that's why I worry a bit about that clause. I hate the idea of licensing my software by a license that doesn't even exist and whose terms I don't know.
Here are some that might be on the horizon, although some or all may be a stretch, and some may already be happening. What do you all think?
I agree, some are a stretch. But some are exactly what I'm talking about:
Adobe and.ps/.pdf
Microsoft and.doc
Although I use postscript and pdf all the time, I worry a little. I realize that they've been so useful to me because Adobe has published the formats and allowed implementations to thrive. They could pull a Unisys, though.
And MSFT's.doc format? Just Say No.
Whenever you depend upon something that you use by permission, not by right, you are creating a dependency that may cost you in the future.
These delayed-action patent issues are becoming predictable. The community ought to keep its collective eyes out for this in the future. While not exactly the same, the similarities are striking:
gif/unisys/lzw Unisys waits until the file format is literally covering the world, and then threatens lawsuits.
Rambus We've been using SDRAM for how long, and they're just waking up to the idea that they have patents on it?
CDDB Don't worry, it's "free." Right. Sure.
Now, Fraunhofer...
We should all be experienced enough with this phenomenon to see it coming a mile away. From this perspective, things like Windows Media are not competitors to mp3, they are just different complainants in the patent lawsuits.
I strenuously suggest people use png,.ogg, and anything other technology that isn't trying to strangle open standards.
The Internet wouldn't have existed if they played by these rules at the beginning.
Their "application" (a webcrawler not logging 'illegal' mp3s) is a load of crap. Let's say I have cut in the first 15 seconds of a copywritten song--without permission--as a sample that I go on to critique in the audio file. I think that's fair use.
IANAL, but neither is the webcrawler a lawyer. It doesn't have the ability to judge fair use.
Worse, think if this 'webcrawler' is an RIAA bot looking for people to sue. It could lead to lots of frivolous actions.
Steve
This is the right thing to do
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 4
this isn't the right thing to do. Why? Because as much as we
might like to, you can't turn back the clock - a principle made abundently clear by
the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Actually, we can turn back the clock (i.e., bring back the tiger). You seem to be arguing that we shouldn't because we can't. That's just silly. We can and we will.
Like it or not, life follows a plan, and once something has happened we need to deal with it and move on.
Actually, there is no cosmic plan; we learn what we can about the world through own own brains and try to get along as best we can. And humans deal with nature not by adapting (in the sense of passive adjustment), but by understanding and adapting it to us. Tiger extinct? Let's learn to bring it back. Hell, we're close to bringing back the Wooly Mammoth from the last ice age, 10k years ago.
Using science to figure out the universe around us is what we do. This is just one more example--and if it brings back a tiger, then it's a net benefit, so I don't see the problem.
If it's true, this is a very smart move on Microsoft's part. They've left Linux to its own devices for some time now, and the lack of an office suite has been one of the biggest shortcomings of linux as an office desktop.
But now that viable linux Office suites are coming into their own, and the lack of one won't hold linux back much longer, they can jump in with MSFT Office and claim a big marketshare of office suite installations on Linux.
Hell, if they port DCOM and a bunch of apps that use it, then they can run with the 'it works better on Windows' strategy that they have used with Apple.
Plus, when you've got a few billion in cash, it's not a bad idea to have a few products in your back pocket waiting for hte right time to release.
I would tell my employer, if asked to come up with such a list or algorithm, "It's impossible."
Do you think you can get a set of requirements from an audience, and then go and filter the 'net so they would get only what they want, and all of what they want? I don't think it's possible, and I think that's why censorware is bad. If I thought it was possible, I'd be working on it day and night. Whoever makes that software is an instant billionaire.
I'd tell my boss the best I can do is block "too much," leading to complaints of inappropriate filtering; or "not enough," leading to complaints of contributing to the delinquency of the schoolkids. In short, I'd tell him there's no way to do what he wants---not because you're not good enough to do it, but because it can't be done.
Let him decide which risk his business should take after that.
From the article, this sounds more like a delay in implementation than Intel giving up on Rambus.
It's one small step on a long road that Intel must travel to win my confidence back. Their last year of gaffes has lost nearly all the goodwill they built up with me
If only it could be taken a step further. Like some way to have firms actually take seriously a license that GPL's (or BSD's) a piece of software x years after it's no longer supported. (Preferably where x=0.)
It increases the value of the software, by making consumers know that if it is good, someone will always be there to take up development on it.
Maybe they could put the code with some sort of escrow company, who reviews all the software and GPL's it as appropriate.
Some of the complaints against GTK-- remind me of Miguel's Let's make UNIX not suck paper. Flexibility for flexibility's sake, not setting policy, etc.
As an amateur developer, I have encountered tools where an interface was provided, but every FAQ, on-line doc, and expert on the tool would tell you to avoid it. It always makes me wonder why in hell the interface was built in the first place.
Many of these dangerous interfaces may be there by accident, or because the original designer did not forsee the danger in their inclusion. But that still leaves them as bad interfaces; you should try to avoid providing such interfaces in a new library or tool.
My $2E-2 (Actually, I think it's Miguel's $0.02, because I hadn't thought about it until I read his paper yesterday:-)
I wrote a C/C++ preprocessor that lets you use Python-style whitespace-significant code, called Cugar to escape the ugliness of C.
I shudder when I think of programming with significant whitespace. It's what has kept me from picking up Python in earnest--at least until I write a conversion program that turns braces into the whitespace that python likes (in Perl:-).
To think that C would be made *better* by the addition of significant whitespace gives me the chills.
A system for providing scheduled messages to a remote user in a batch oriented system.
Can't we at least find prior art for this bit? usr/bin/fortune ring a bell?:-)
Actually, this seems too obvious to be properly awarded. Consider if you were given the following requirements:
must display ads, and cycle every x seconds
must not rely on persistent network connection
Under such circumstances, would not any reasonably competent programmer be able to suggest downloading several ads while online and cycling them via a timer in the local program? How flipping obvious do these have to get before they're not considered 'inventions'?
This stuff gets my goat because it makes a mockery out of true inventors.
It's been said before, but the RIAA is just shooting itself in the foot. They need to be working with Napster or creating their own on-line music distribution/sharing system.
It seems so obvious to/.'ers, but the RIAA still seems to miss this point. If I were in the recording industry, I'd be looking ahead as many years as I could to see which way the market is going. I'd be trying to anticipate the market and be an early adopter to collect the marvelous profits that accompany such adoption, done well.
There are now about 5 years of experience out there of moving retail sales to the internet. Electronic-format books and music are lagging because they're worried that the cat will be let out of the bag when they distribute online. But the cat is out already for the RIAA member companies! Every wasted minute is lost profit! You'd think that they'd see Napster's user stats as a potential market that turned to piracy because they were ignored, and act to supply that market.
Again, from the RIAA's perspective, having affordable digital distribution running when they sue Napster would also solve many of their PR problems. "See?" they could say, "you can get what you want for $x per song from us, you pirates!"
The RIAA are handling this in the wrong way, even from the perspective of their own self-interest.
This case is not about illegal distribution; it's about distribution without the RIAA's blessing.
It is about illegal distribution. Distribution of copywritten materials without the consent of the copyright holders is illegal. There are some exceptions to this (e.g., 'fair use'), but none of those seem to apply to Naptster.
Plus, the RIAA is going after Napster for contributing to the illegal distribution (as it is the individual user who is actually committing the act). They are allegedly contributing by providing the file-swapping service, trading on the merits of the illegal trade, and not taking precautions which are reasonable in light of the rampant illegal distribution on their service.
I think that the RIAA has done some ridiculous things, but that doesn't paint Napster white.
I have no problem killing my food; but I also love pets. Growing up closer to one's food, in the midst of nowhere, imparts on one how animals are great values to man--in more ways than one. They can be great pets or great food. But they are not rational beings and do not have rights. There's no point in senseless sufferring, for sure, but there's less sense in foregoing one's food.
Unfortunately for the world, it's hard to imagine a more poorly equipped society to deal with the Human Genome Project than the U.S.
I'm not a citizen of the US. But I can think of no country more able to deal with this discovery. While not perfect, the US is the best.
I think some commentators, as Mr Katz here, may be forgetting just what this type of thing means to theocracies or dictatorships. And most of the countries in this world have little semblance of representative government. Of those with representative government, an extreme few are proper constitutional republics.
It is much easier to overthorw a citizen's rights in a country without a written constitution. In the US, courts can enforce the Constitution above statutes (unlike Canada where a 2/3 majority can legally abrogate almost anything in our toothless "Charter" of freedoms--sheesh!).
In short, the US may have lots of flaws at the moment, but it's still got more checks and balances than any world government operating today.
This is something that I never really noticed until now. Note how the price structure works:
Students -- big discount
Academics -- big discount
Commercial, volume purchases -- discount
Single Hobbyist/Developer -- full price
Not that I'm complaining--they're entitled to go after any market they like. It's just plain from the price structure that they've no interest in the grassroots individual developer market at all.
It's probably not a bad choice, if they want to keep it for use only with "network devices" rather than PCs. But still, as PalmOS has shown, having grassroots developer support for non-PC computing devices is certainly an asset.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your source? Literacy was always the badge of the elite: of citizens in Greece (wealthy men only), clergy in the middle ages, etc. It's only been relatively recently that universal literacy has been a goal, and only in parts of the world.
Likewise, in an increasingly literate and wealthy society, public libraries are less important. At one time they were the only way for most people to get books, now they are mostly just a (taxpayer-subsidized) cheaper alternative.
In an increasingly wealthy society, they should try to fit a modern niche. There are subscription libraries for certain types of specialized information. This is a great idea for those who want to share the cost of many $14,000 subscriptions, for a $20 per month fee.
Sure, there's something preventing you from doing that: a patent.
Look at all the products out there with a patent on some critical piece of them. You cannot copy and distribute those products either.
SteveI love TPJ.
It's in good editorial hands, and the community produces some great material for it. I think it's a great fit for the Perl community [such little as I've seen of it].
So, if EarthWeb doesn't want it, perhaps O'Reilly would like to break into periodical publishing. C'mon, Tim, you know you want to!
And just how are we to 'work to make this' anything if it's not free software? Don't like Miguel's focus? Grab the sources and start hacking. Can't write code? Get some cash together and pay a bunch of hackers to make it what you want.
If it wasn't GNU-compliant, you wouldn't be able to take the "let's make it x" attitude at all.
In contrast to your thought that having the software be free helps no one, I think it helps anyone--anyone who wants to take advantage of it.
Your post reads like more armchair quarterbacking than anything else.
I credit tetris with popularizing the whole genre of puzzle games. It spawned more clones than any other game I can think of, due to it's simplicity and addictiveness.
I'm not surprised it didn't make this list. The list wasn't a survey of PC gaming, so much as a subset of PC gaming for the teenage boys who comprise the most avid members.
Steve
Wow.
I got the static binary tarball. Unpacked and tried it on SuSE 7.0.
Game runs; looks good. Spacebar for fire doesn't work. Hmm... Two minutes into play, X just dies and kdm restarts it. Hmm...
Same thing happens next time, except it's not just X. The machine spontaneously reboots. Wow. I've never been able to do that on my linux machines, no matter how many flailing pointers I've dereferenced. :-)
I may try this later, when someone else finds a stable configuration.
Steve
You mean to tell me that an outgoing president is advocating huge spending in the last months of his term? Incredible! He's setting expectations that his Republican successor may find it hard to follow? Unthinkable!
The next thing you know, he'll be pardoning every friend of his party in the slammer and pushing through a bunch of legislation, just before he leaves.
Oh yeah, I forgot, that's what every outbound president does these days. Why be surprised?
Steve
In a sense, can't the GNU project do exactly that? There's a clause I have always wondered about in the standard template people copy into their files to signify that it is GPLed. The interesting phrase is what version you can use:
Most people just copy and paste this into their programs. But what if version 3 of the GPL has some big deficiencies? What if RMS dies, and his evil half-brother tkaes over the FSF and starts adding in exemption clauses that let distributed sources be kept closed?
IANAL, and that's why I worry a bit about that clause. I hate the idea of licensing my software by a license that doesn't even exist and whose terms I don't know.
Any ideas?
I agree, some are a stretch. But some are exactly what I'm talking about:
Although I use postscript and pdf all the time, I worry a little. I realize that they've been so useful to me because Adobe has published the formats and allowed implementations to thrive. They could pull a Unisys, though.
And MSFT's .doc format? Just Say No.
Whenever you depend upon something that you use by permission, not by right, you are creating a dependency that may cost you in the future.
SteveThese delayed-action patent issues are becoming predictable. The community ought to keep its collective eyes out for this in the future. While not exactly the same, the similarities are striking:
We should all be experienced enough with this phenomenon to see it coming a mile away. From this perspective, things like Windows Media are not competitors to mp3, they are just different complainants in the patent lawsuits.
I strenuously suggest people use png, .ogg, and anything other technology that isn't trying to strangle open standards.
The Internet wouldn't have existed if they played by these rules at the beginning.
Steve
Their "application" (a webcrawler not logging 'illegal' mp3s) is a load of crap. Let's say I have cut in the first 15 seconds of a copywritten song--without permission--as a sample that I go on to critique in the audio file. I think that's fair use.
IANAL, but neither is the webcrawler a lawyer. It doesn't have the ability to judge fair use.
Worse, think if this 'webcrawler' is an RIAA bot looking for people to sue. It could lead to lots of frivolous actions.
SteveActually, we can turn back the clock (i.e., bring back the tiger). You seem to be arguing that we shouldn't because we can't. That's just silly. We can and we will.
Actually, there is no cosmic plan; we learn what we can about the world through own own brains and try to get along as best we can. And humans deal with nature not by adapting (in the sense of passive adjustment), but by understanding and adapting it to us. Tiger extinct? Let's learn to bring it back. Hell, we're close to bringing back the Wooly Mammoth from the last ice age, 10k years ago.
Using science to figure out the universe around us is what we do. This is just one more example--and if it brings back a tiger, then it's a net benefit, so I don't see the problem.
SteveIf it's true, this is a very smart move on Microsoft's part. They've left Linux to its own devices for some time now, and the lack of an office suite has been one of the biggest shortcomings of linux as an office desktop.
But now that viable linux Office suites are coming into their own, and the lack of one won't hold linux back much longer, they can jump in with MSFT Office and claim a big marketshare of office suite installations on Linux.
Hell, if they port DCOM and a bunch of apps that use it, then they can run with the 'it works better on Windows' strategy that they have used with Apple.
Plus, when you've got a few billion in cash, it's not a bad idea to have a few products in your back pocket waiting for hte right time to release.
SteveI would tell my employer, if asked to come up with such a list or algorithm, "It's impossible."
Do you think you can get a set of requirements from an audience, and then go and filter the 'net so they would get only what they want, and all of what they want? I don't think it's possible, and I think that's why censorware is bad. If I thought it was possible, I'd be working on it day and night. Whoever makes that software is an instant billionaire.
I'd tell my boss the best I can do is block "too much," leading to complaints of inappropriate filtering; or "not enough," leading to complaints of contributing to the delinquency of the schoolkids. In short, I'd tell him there's no way to do what he wants---not because you're not good enough to do it, but because it can't be done.
Let him decide which risk his business should take after that.
SteveFrom the article, this sounds more like a delay in implementation than Intel giving up on Rambus.
It's one small step on a long road that Intel must travel to win my confidence back. Their last year of gaffes has lost nearly all the goodwill they built up with me
SteveI think this is a great idea.
If only it could be taken a step further. Like some way to have firms actually take seriously a license that GPL's (or BSD's) a piece of software x years after it's no longer supported. (Preferably where x=0.)
It increases the value of the software, by making consumers know that if it is good, someone will always be there to take up development on it.
Maybe they could put the code with some sort of escrow company, who reviews all the software and GPL's it as appropriate.
Anyone working on this?
SteveAs an amateur developer, I have encountered tools where an interface was provided, but every FAQ, on-line doc, and expert on the tool would tell you to avoid it. It always makes me wonder why in hell the interface was built in the first place.
Many of these dangerous interfaces may be there by accident, or because the original designer did not forsee the danger in their inclusion. But that still leaves them as bad interfaces; you should try to avoid providing such interfaces in a new library or tool.
My $2E-2 (Actually, I think it's Miguel's $0.02, because I hadn't thought about it until I read his paper yesterday :-)
SteveI shudder when I think of programming with significant whitespace. It's what has kept me from picking up Python in earnest--at least until I write a conversion program that turns braces into the whitespace that python likes (in Perl :-).
To think that C would be made *better* by the addition of significant whitespace gives me the chills.
SteveCan't we at least find prior art for this bit? usr/bin/fortune ring a bell? :-)
Actually, this seems too obvious to be properly awarded. Consider if you were given the following requirements:
Under such circumstances, would not any reasonably competent programmer be able to suggest downloading several ads while online and cycling them via a timer in the local program? How flipping obvious do these have to get before they're not considered 'inventions'?
This stuff gets my goat because it makes a mockery out of true inventors.
SteveI hope many, many means of spamming are discovered and patented! Then there will be:
I say, let the spammers make it as hard as they can for each other. No skin off our nose, and it may actually reduce the amount of spam out there.
Steve
It seems so obvious to /.'ers, but the RIAA still seems to miss this point. If I were in the recording industry, I'd be looking ahead as many years as I could to see which way the market is going. I'd be trying to anticipate the market and be an early adopter to collect the marvelous profits that accompany such adoption, done well.
There are now about 5 years of experience out there of moving retail sales to the internet. Electronic-format books and music are lagging because they're worried that the cat will be let out of the bag when they distribute online. But the cat is out already for the RIAA member companies! Every wasted minute is lost profit! You'd think that they'd see Napster's user stats as a potential market that turned to piracy because they were ignored, and act to supply that market.
Again, from the RIAA's perspective, having affordable digital distribution running when they sue Napster would also solve many of their PR problems. "See?" they could say, "you can get what you want for $x per song from us, you pirates!"
The RIAA are handling this in the wrong way, even from the perspective of their own self-interest.
SteveBlockquoth the previous poster:
It is about illegal distribution. Distribution of copywritten materials without the consent of the copyright holders is illegal. There are some exceptions to this (e.g., 'fair use'), but none of those seem to apply to Naptster.
Plus, the RIAA is going after Napster for contributing to the illegal distribution (as it is the individual user who is actually committing the act). They are allegedly contributing by providing the file-swapping service, trading on the merits of the illegal trade, and not taking precautions which are reasonable in light of the rampant illegal distribution on their service.
I think that the RIAA has done some ridiculous things, but that doesn't paint Napster white.
SteveI have no problem killing my food; but I also love pets. Growing up closer to one's food, in the midst of nowhere, imparts on one how animals are great values to man--in more ways than one. They can be great pets or great food. But they are not rational beings and do not have rights. There's no point in senseless sufferring, for sure, but there's less sense in foregoing one's food.
Remember that humans are omnivorous.
steve
I'm not a citizen of the US. But I can think of no country more able to deal with this discovery. While not perfect, the US is the best.
I think some commentators, as Mr Katz here, may be forgetting just what this type of thing means to theocracies or dictatorships. And most of the countries in this world have little semblance of representative government. Of those with representative government, an extreme few are proper constitutional republics.
It is much easier to overthorw a citizen's rights in a country without a written constitution. In the US, courts can enforce the Constitution above statutes (unlike Canada where a 2/3 majority can legally abrogate almost anything in our toothless "Charter" of freedoms--sheesh!).
In short, the US may have lots of flaws at the moment, but it's still got more checks and balances than any world government operating today.
Steve
Not that I'm complaining--they're entitled to go after any market they like. It's just plain from the price structure that they've no interest in the grassroots individual developer market at all.
It's probably not a bad choice, if they want to keep it for use only with "network devices" rather than PCs. But still, as PalmOS has shown, having grassroots developer support for non-PC computing devices is certainly an asset.
Steve