A minor nitpick on this. The genome has been mapped, but what's really happened is that it's been sequenced. Mapping a genome is a far older technique created by Thomas Hunt Morgan with his work on Drosophila (his undergrad whose name escapes me had the big insight on ordering the genes). Mapping just places genes at relative distances from each other. This is done by classical techniques such as breeding and linkage analysis.
Sequencing is actually getting the nucleotides (letters) on the DNA strand. It's done by taking the DNA itself and running it through what's known as the Sanger or Dideoxide method. It's those (often brightly colored) bands you see on TV whenever they talk about the genome project. This is a much more modern and fruitful endeavor than mapping a gene, because with the sequence you can start to do some actual analysis as to what the gene does. Sequencing also allows you to find genes that you didn't know were there in the first place. Because the whole genome is essentially sequenced, it's mapped as well, but a genetic sequence is a lot more important than a genetic map.
I don't know why I'm feeding this troll, but I'm going to. For me, "winning" against MS isn't about having linux everywhere (although that would be heaven). Winning is about having the choice not to use MS. I don't like Windows. Never have. Never will. I was a Mac guy, and just like gmhowell described so well, I was pretty much sick of Apple and jumped ship. I had the greatest, most unified UI on the planet (Win still can't touch it), and I jumped off.
And I, like gmhowell, jumped because I wanted to be free.
I don't like the fact that Apple and MS are able to dictate to users. Winning for me is the freedom, the choice, and the power to decide what I want to do. Don't like a new feature? I can disable it all the way to the point of deleting the code within the source itself. Don't want the new version of X? Fine. I don't have to upgrade until I'm ready, not when Apple or MS says from above "It's time krmt". I have the choice to decide how I want my computing experience to be, and winning for me is not allowing MS or anyone else to take that away from me. That's what Free software is all about.
It's not about having the most unified interface. It's not about our differences. It's not about the hubris or the third parties or the candy coating or the snappy wiz bang features. It's about Freedom. And all your complaints can never take that away.
... is the people. Seriously, Windows can't really say that because there is no real "Windows community". Mac people can talk about it, but they are still dependant on Apple for all wants and needs. On the other hand, Linux is written, used, and supported by the people themselves. Those figures, all of it from the the lines of code to the language percentages, just illustrate who and what we are as a community.
It's something I could go on and on forever about because it really is something special in a world dominated by the shadow of Gates and Jobs. "Those people" who work "over there" don't make this. We do! While all those numbers can start to quantify this, you can't really put a dollar value on it the same way you can't put a dollar value on freedom. Funny thing to be able to say that about a bunch of software...
You've got it right on here. But the real problem was talked about in the beginning of the article, and that is that the music industry has turned in to a hit factory rather than a place to grow artists. The reason the RIAA is so scared of people going outside what's dictated by them is that they're putting all their eggs in a few baskets. Right now it's the pop stuff and it's going great for them.
We have seen what happens when their hit factory fails to produce though. Remember around '96 or so? The big "electronica" movement that was supposed to "save rock"? Never happened. Prodigy released an album and some people liked it, but there was no gigantic tidal wave to save the industry's pocketbooks and there was a lot of hand wringing. People were faced with two choices pretty much, buy or don't buy, and they chose not to buy.
Napster allows people to choose not to buy again, and that's what hurts. It's not so much that the music's free (like the article said) but that people have a choice in choosing not to buy what MTV is pushing right this second. The hit factory is totally subverted as well, because a lot of people who would have bought the CD for the single just downloaded the damn thing instead. The RIAA's "album full of crap with a diamond in it" mentality fails utterly. This wouldn't be the case if they were developing as many artists as possible to be successful and produce quality albums. Instead of investing money that way though, they take the quick and easy path, and they're scared of the possible consequences.
My most honest hope is that the online stuff really will start to sink its teeth in to the pocketbooks, and that maybe the record labels will wake up and re-shift their focus from the dollars to the artist, and from the image back to the music (tough in the MTV era, but still possible as electronic music proves). I don't care about downloading music for free. I just want to have some choices, and I want the radio to not sound like "fridge buzz". I want American culture to feel vibrant again, and I want the music to be the driving force behind it. And I can only hope it happens soon.
If the closest analogy to "all this whining" that you can think of is a web browser shipping with an OS, then you really are not a very creative individual. I like this analogy better: plagiarising a research paper versus xeroxing or quoting it.
A normal web browser basically is xeroxing the paper. It doesn't look exactly as it did when it was sent off to the publisher, or even exactly as it did in the magazine or journal itself (although close), but the content is all the same. No one has altered anything the author has to say and the copyright on the paper remains unviolated.
Now take Smart tags. Smart tags actually alter the content in such a way that the page itself is changed. A fundamental part of the Web medium is the ability to hyperlink, and when an author puts those links on a page, it constitutes part of the work as copyrighted by them. Look at the bottom of any serious web page and you'll see a copyright notice there. By adding additional links to the page, Microsoft is having users create derivative works based upon the web pages without permission from the page authors. This is a violation of the author's copyright and is equivalent to plagiarism by the end user, as facilitated by Microsoft.
Granted, this is essentially the Napster argument, where it could be legal (if the page is public domain for instance), but because MS is causing these tags to work without any input from the author, they are facilitating illegal uses. Bundling the browser with the OS does not put you at a disadvantage if you don't have a web page because it does not alter your work in any way. Smart Tags actually do alter the content, at least as displayed (much like taking someone else's essay, altering a few words, and publishing it as your own) and this is illegal. Cut and paste in the task bar also does not alter the content, but merely "quotes" from it.
Perhaps you don't care about the copyright on your work, but I do, and maybe if you thought about the issue more than apologizing for MS and calling it "whining" maybe you'd see what the real issues here are.
hehe. Not so much on allowing them to be implemented, but just the whole moral side of them. It's a tricky issue and you summed up a good chunk of them really well, IMHO.:-)
is that statistics are unreliable at best. We've got conflicting numbers and interests all over the place, with all these surveys. In the end, it doesn't matter becuse Linux is a good server OS and it will continue to gain ground, especially as the younger people come up and start pushing it as an alternative to Windows et al.
What's really important isn't what numbers linux is doing now, but what it's going to be doing in the future.
I admit, this issue is a pretty slippery slope, and you give a bunch of good arguments for the Smart Tags, but I'm still finding it difficult to agree with you, simply because all the things you list are prefaced with "People's right", where the Smart Tags don't really have anything to do with people's rights.
* People's right to use translators
The translator is invoked directly by the user in order to allow them to understand the content in the first place. The translator does not attempt to alter the content of the page per se, but rather to redisplay it with the content fully intact in another linguisticformat.
* People's right to link a web browser to a dictionary so they can easily look up words that they don't know the meaning of
The link to the dictionary does not alter the presentation of the content itself.
* People's right to use third-party annotations, such a Third Voice
Third Voice got bitchslapped in court itself, and the presentation of ThirdVoice from my understanding was that it was not directly on the pages themselves but in ancillary areas.
Finally, style sheets, rendering, and caching don't affect content.
The real slippery portion is the Javascript and ad filtering. The first problem is that all these are on by default (essentially) and that it is a (relatively) rare choice to turn them off. This, despite what MS says, will come enabled by default in the release after XP.
The other issue is that all of these features remove the ability to see content. While it may be frivolous content (ads) or good content (like that cool martial arts flash animation) it's content that you are choosing to miss out on never the less, the same way you are choosing not to click every link on a web page. What the Smart Tags do is to add content rather than take it away. You, as a Smart Tags user, are modifying the author's creation in order to appropriate it for your own uses. It's not unlike plagiarism versus quoting. If you are disabling Java, you are sort of "quoting" the site, taking what lines you need as they are and leaving them intact. If you are enabling Smart Tags, you are committing something closer to plagiarism, where you take the author's work and displaying it as your own. The text is the author's work, and displaying it as links to your own sites is simply appropriating the work for your own purposes.
I have no problems with this if the author decides to put a notice on his page that it's in the public domain, but if it is copyright by some entity, then you are creating a derivative work and you owe royalties. It's the author's decision, much the same way it's a programmer's decision to GPL his code for public use or keep it for himself. Smart Tags violate the rights of the content author by actually altering their content without permission, as opposed to using whatever parts of it are desired without alteration. MS is allowing its users to plagiarize the web for its own benefit, and that's what is really wrong.
I'm very sad about this. Before I found/., suck was far and away my favorite site. I looked forward to Filler every Wednesday, and all the specials. I'll definitely miss Terry's artwork too.
Suck was a great site from the days of "content is king", which I still believe is true, although perhaps user submitted content really is the only way to survive. Sad, sad, sad. I'll miss Feed too, they always made me think, at least a little, which is a very admirable thing for a web drowning in pages and stories that deserve a feature from Something Awful.
Anyways, thanks for all the bile and deprecatory humor suck (including the self deprecatory). It's going to be a lonely net now that Hack and the Fish aren't on it.
Yeah, I definitely agree with you on the Apple menu thing. I do like the dock, but I wish there was a customizable apple menu for options I use a little less often.
The file type/creator associations are something that I haven't tried to deal with, but you're right that there should be some way of manually altering them, although I really hope they make it easier than it is in windows.
The only complaint I had other than the Apple menu is that the whole GUI feels kinda big (not hd size-wise, which is what I think you meant) but that all the icons take up too much space. Once I shrank the dock down, this feeling shrank with it, but it still feels kinda inefficient with screen real-estate, especially when working on an iMac.
As for the other stuff, it's probably because I use the console way too much for my own good:-)
I hope apple does address all those issues you mentioned though (particularly the apple menu one)because an OS like the Mac should be able to balance more customization with ease of use. I think right now that they're still just trying to work out the kinks in the system, and hopefully they'll add obvious things like file type/creator stuff (and groups without netinfo manager) that really do need to be there. We can hope though!
I don't understand why you think the OS9 GUI is so much better. I was a rabid mac fan (i.e. I got tired of waiting for Copland, then Be, then OSX and jumped ship to Linux) but now that I've gotten a chance to explore the OSX interface I'm really pleased with it. Sure, it's not exactly the same as the old one, but change isn't necessarily bad.
A ton of old Mac users feel betrayed or something because Apple threw out a decade+ worth of interface, when in fact a lot of the original good ideas are still there. The menu bar at the top of the screen. The trash can. Drag and drop (works better than it ever did for me in OS9 and before). The control panels. These are the major innovations that still distinguish the mac over windows (well, maybe not the trash can and control panels still) and they're still present.
Well what's actually different besides the looks? Button placement (still getting used to that one). No control strip. File system heirarchy. And the dock. Oh, and the apple menu is diminished (which I don't like either). Overall, these are minor concessions. The control strip will be replaced with dock apps. The file system is a result of unix, and it's a sacrifice that had to be made.
But overall, OSX feels comfy to me. It doesn't quite feel like a mac anymore, but that's because my conception of the mac carries a lot of baggage about performance and bland looks left over from my system 7 days:-). But it's still true to the overall spirit of the mac, which is fun, ease of use, and simple cool factor. I can't really say that any other OS out there has that feeling, and OSX is carrying that core of the Mac in to the future.
I don't usually like to respond to posts like this but, why don't you just get off your ass and write what you want yourself? I know I know... you don't have the time to do it, or the knowledge, or whatever, but then please stop bitching about what you're getting for free.
It seems that the golden rule of free software, the do it yourself mentality that actually produces code, is being lost in the noise of people who just want shit handed to them.
"Our browser's not good enough, Mozilla is slow!" Well, go help speed it up.
"Our interface sucks!" Change it to suit yourself.
"I want a good office suite!" Go pick one help out on it.
Geez... you'd think you were living in a world that didn't encourage users to participate in software development...
Hey, don't legions of indie rockers obsess over Radiohead? Go on Napster and do a few searches under Radiohead and you'll see. Didn't caravans of fans follow around Phish (including all the old dead heads after Jerry Garcia died)? Go on Napster and you'll find a shitload of phish bootlegs just like the Dead had. Weren't the beatles initially written off as pop trash and boring guitar music?
The fact remains that people still like music, some of it is innovative (Radiohead), some of it is obsessive (Phish), and some of it is still pop trash (Destiny's Child) but that doesn't mean that they'll stay pop trash forever. Not that I think Destiny's Child is going to be the next beatles, but the parent is simply ignoring both the musical realities of today and yesterday.
I don't think you realize how big those old bands actually were because you've been caught in that fun little distortion field that says everyone around listened to Zepplin and the Dead and all those other bands, which isn't any more true than saying everyone listens to the Backstreet boys now.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Re:Tolkien's remark deeper than it looks ...
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Lord of the Geeks
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I was going to mod you up but I wanted to reply instead. I think you're very correct about the metaphor idea. Tolkien's work isn't an allegory (like the Faery Queen by Edmund Spencer for example) in that the whole story isn't a metaphor, but the themes that run through it help grab us in ways that everyone who likes the books understands at some basic level.
It's important though that Tolkien's work isn't a wholly original creation. The precedent of Arthurian legends and Beowulf certaintly lend some important weight to his work. The fertility myth (Arthur) is a very important classic genre, and in many ways LOTR can be seen as inheriting from that. The theme of retribution after desolation via sacrifice is critical and is prevalent in many modern works as well. Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" can be construed this way for instance. This is in contrast to many other modern works that does not have such endings, like Paul Auster's "City of Glass" and Beckett's "Waiting for Godot".
The thing about literary critics is they are just waiting to show off how smart they are. No one gets upset with James Joyce for making "Finnigan's Wake" completely impenetrable (anyone who says they understand that work is a liar), but they rail against Tolkien for making a work that is just as original and epic in scale and still accessible at the same time. It's this kind of attitude that turns people off to literature (it's the same attitude that critics have towards "Harry Potter" right now) and it's really very sad. There's nothing I like as much as a challenging piece of art, but everyone wants a good story now and then. "Lonesome Dove" can sit happily next to my copy of "Gravity's Rainbow", and it depreciates neither.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Re:Do you have Britney Spears home address?
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Napster Going Legit
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"While the latest release from futureband2050 might be mildly entertaining, nobody is going to worship them the way throngs of indie rockers once went apeshit over Radiohead; nobody is going to follow them from city to city the way caravans followed Phish. Rock n Roll has become a dead religion.
"This year, I heard that a band called "The Beatles" won a bunch of awards. From the TV blub, they look kind of cute, and seem to be a band that sings shopworn 2-part harmonies over shopworn pop rock melodies. At the time, it occurred to me that I have not heard more than a 20-second blip from any of their songs. So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen idols and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?"
While I totally agree that artists should own their own music and that they are getting screwed royally by the record companies, I think that people underestimate how much the record companies do.
The companies don't just package up a recording and ship it off to the store. They have to hire a producer, pay for the cost of recording and producing the album, pay for the promotional materials such as videos on MTV and recordings for radio stations all over the world, pay for advertisements in magazines and such, and pay to scout out new acts.
That's a pretty hefty list. Now imagine that they do it for a ton of artists, where 1 in 100 is really successful. That's a lot of money that you don't recoup.
Because of all that, the cost of simply distributing music is not enough to pay the middleman, and companies should charge more than the very slim fee you're talking about. The thing is, they won't even get close to this number because they've already gone way above it and they're not going back now that they've got the cash cow.
They could use tools like Napster in order to really lower the costs of promotion, but they only see it as a threat to their bottom line so they're going after them full bore.
The other cause of this is the "big hit" model of record sales, where you rely on a band to put out one huge single to move volumes of records in order to recoup any other losses. Ideally, and this is what they used to do more, is that a company will invest in an artist to grow them a fan base and make them profitable overall. These kinds of artists don't sell in the mainstream, but don't put out the singles either and still sell a respectable amount of records. These kinds of artists aren't the cash cows of the industry who are gone 5 years later, but the bands who have a solid fanbase and sell records slowly over the longterm and wind up producing a solid back catalog. Developing artists like this costs a fair amount to start (although not as much as it does to launch a major hit band) but they wind up being solid profit columns on the balance sheet.
If the recording industry used Napster et al. in order to grow these kinds of artists for the long term they wouldn't be so worried about people pirating music. But they themselves have developed a very lucrative model based on singles that is now being threatened by mp3 swapping. The fact that they gouge consumers while only trying to give back fluffy one hit wonders is what's going to hurt them, because they didn't help to develop the artists, no one's going to help develop them.
This is fact. Everyone I know in college got DSL or cable the instant they got their own places. While a lot of users may be getting dialup, once they, and their kids, try broadband, they're never going back.
Moulin Rouge's story is a retelling of the story of Orpheus. In short, the man is an amazing musician who goes down in to the underworld to bring his dead wife back in to the living. No one else was ever able to do this, but Orpheus is able to succeed by his musical talents. There is more to the story, as I'm sure many people know, but that's why it's predictable: you've heard the story itself a billion times before in different forms.
But it doesn't matter because Baz Luhrmann manages to retell the story in his own way that is very charming and funny and psychotic all at once. Everyone who's seen Strictly Ballroom or his version of Romeo and Juliet (the DiCaprio and Danes one) knows that his style is very fast paced and crazy, but visually stunning. That works perfectly in this film, which isn't meant to be taken as reality but as a depiction of a supernatural place, like in the tale of Orpheus. The plot is sappy, but it doesn't matter because it's told with humor and seriousness all at once, in a way that is so amazing visually that you won't believe your eyes.
The familarity of the plot is what allows you to handle the appearances, and the crazy appearances breathe new life in to an old tale. That's what makes this movie great and well worth seeing.
I agree with you, and I think I've got some precedent for why it won't work: AOL.
AOL is really all about centralization. The whole family unit can share an account, you use their email system located in their gigantic email/chat/web/IM/news/info/etc program that's really very pretty and friendly. You can centrally do everything you want from AOL itself, much like what Hailstorm is promising, and you never really have to leave it if you don't want.
And AOL is really popular. Fantastically so.
But relatively few people actually use all that centralization. They use AOL for email, web, chat, and IM, and that's mainly it. I've never met anyone (and I've known quite a few AOL users) who's actually used AOL itself to buy anything. People like to chat and build a community, and that's why AOL , and the internet is really successful, not for the ability to buy airline tickets right alongside a crockpot. Sites like/. just go on to prove this fact.
Microsoft isn't looking to build a community at all, they're looking to make things more convenient and ubiquitous. While people do like convenience (and the convenience of having email, web, chat, etc. in one place helps make AOL so popular) I don't think people are really looking for the kind of convenience that Hailstorm will offer. Granted, a lot of people will sign up for it, but I don't think it'll be that critical mass that'll make it ubiquitous. It's the same thing with Microsoft's instant messenger client. No one really uses it, because AOL was there first and everyone uses AIM because their friends use AIM. It'll be the same thing with Hailstorm, no one will use it because AOL was there first with all the convenient, one place info/shop-o-rama system, plus you get to use the chat rooms too!
Aside from AOL, portal sites like excite offer centralized calendar, customized news, portfolio, email accounts, and a thousand other features already. All from a central location. All available through any web browser. And when was the last time you heard someone hyping a portal site?
Not that Hailstorm wouldn't improve on the portal concept at all, but without something really good that takes it above and beyond (and storing your credit card numbers online is not enough of a bonus) it's just not going to go anywhere.
Good point, but do you really think Yopy is going to evolve the market with their $400 device? I think it'll be the ones who get the color screen and enough RAM to store a bunch of stupid arcade games down to a price point of a decent cell phone these days. It'll take a while, granted, but that'll sell like hotcakes. You need to be able to lose five of these things in a year and not really be hurting. The Yopy's just not on track to do this.
This isn't bullshit at all because all but Solaris are considered free software. Besides, these are very viable alternatives to closed systems, and because apache is itself free software, it only goes on to prove that free software is a very viable model. Not bullshit but proof, if you actually decide to look at what he's really saying rather than lashing out at the numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so the human genome has been mapped, big deal
A minor nitpick on this. The genome has been mapped, but what's really happened is that it's been sequenced. Mapping a genome is a far older technique created by Thomas Hunt Morgan with his work on Drosophila (his undergrad whose name escapes me had the big insight on ordering the genes). Mapping just places genes at relative distances from each other. This is done by classical techniques such as breeding and linkage analysis.
Sequencing is actually getting the nucleotides (letters) on the DNA strand. It's done by taking the DNA itself and running it through what's known as the Sanger or Dideoxide method. It's those (often brightly colored) bands you see on TV whenever they talk about the genome project. This is a much more modern and fruitful endeavor than mapping a gene, because with the sequence you can start to do some actual analysis as to what the gene does. Sequencing also allows you to find genes that you didn't know were there in the first place. Because the whole genome is essentially sequenced, it's mapped as well, but a genetic sequence is a lot more important than a genetic map.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I don't know why I'm feeding this troll, but I'm going to. For me, "winning" against MS isn't about having linux everywhere (although that would be heaven). Winning is about having the choice not to use MS. I don't like Windows. Never have. Never will. I was a Mac guy, and just like gmhowell described so well, I was pretty much sick of Apple and jumped ship. I had the greatest, most unified UI on the planet (Win still can't touch it), and I jumped off.
And I, like gmhowell, jumped because I wanted to be free.
I don't like the fact that Apple and MS are able to dictate to users. Winning for me is the freedom, the choice, and the power to decide what I want to do. Don't like a new feature? I can disable it all the way to the point of deleting the code within the source itself. Don't want the new version of X? Fine. I don't have to upgrade until I'm ready, not when Apple or MS says from above "It's time krmt". I have the choice to decide how I want my computing experience to be, and winning for me is not allowing MS or anyone else to take that away from me. That's what Free software is all about.
It's not about having the most unified interface. It's not about our differences. It's not about the hubris or the third parties or the candy coating or the snappy wiz bang features. It's about Freedom. And all your complaints can never take that away.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Thank you kindly :-)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
... is the people. Seriously, Windows can't really say that because there is no real "Windows community". Mac people can talk about it, but they are still dependant on Apple for all wants and needs. On the other hand, Linux is written, used, and supported by the people themselves. Those figures, all of it from the the lines of code to the language percentages, just illustrate who and what we are as a community.
It's something I could go on and on forever about because it really is something special in a world dominated by the shadow of Gates and Jobs. "Those people" who work "over there" don't make this. We do! While all those numbers can start to quantify this, you can't really put a dollar value on it the same way you can't put a dollar value on freedom. Funny thing to be able to say that about a bunch of software...
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
This was, in fact, the code in version 1.34 of the gcc to handle #pragmas!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You've got it right on here. But the real problem was talked about in the beginning of the article, and that is that the music industry has turned in to a hit factory rather than a place to grow artists. The reason the RIAA is so scared of people going outside what's dictated by them is that they're putting all their eggs in a few baskets. Right now it's the pop stuff and it's going great for them.
We have seen what happens when their hit factory fails to produce though. Remember around '96 or so? The big "electronica" movement that was supposed to "save rock"? Never happened. Prodigy released an album and some people liked it, but there was no gigantic tidal wave to save the industry's pocketbooks and there was a lot of hand wringing. People were faced with two choices pretty much, buy or don't buy, and they chose not to buy.
Napster allows people to choose not to buy again, and that's what hurts. It's not so much that the music's free (like the article said) but that people have a choice in choosing not to buy what MTV is pushing right this second. The hit factory is totally subverted as well, because a lot of people who would have bought the CD for the single just downloaded the damn thing instead. The RIAA's "album full of crap with a diamond in it" mentality fails utterly. This wouldn't be the case if they were developing as many artists as possible to be successful and produce quality albums. Instead of investing money that way though, they take the quick and easy path, and they're scared of the possible consequences.
My most honest hope is that the online stuff really will start to sink its teeth in to the pocketbooks, and that maybe the record labels will wake up and re-shift their focus from the dollars to the artist, and from the image back to the music (tough in the MTV era, but still possible as electronic music proves). I don't care about downloading music for free. I just want to have some choices, and I want the radio to not sound like "fridge buzz". I want American culture to feel vibrant again, and I want the music to be the driving force behind it. And I can only hope it happens soon.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
If the closest analogy to "all this whining" that you can think of is a web browser shipping with an OS, then you really are not a very creative individual. I like this analogy better: plagiarising a research paper versus xeroxing or quoting it.
A normal web browser basically is xeroxing the paper. It doesn't look exactly as it did when it was sent off to the publisher, or even exactly as it did in the magazine or journal itself (although close), but the content is all the same. No one has altered anything the author has to say and the copyright on the paper remains unviolated.
Now take Smart tags. Smart tags actually alter the content in such a way that the page itself is changed. A fundamental part of the Web medium is the ability to hyperlink, and when an author puts those links on a page, it constitutes part of the work as copyrighted by them. Look at the bottom of any serious web page and you'll see a copyright notice there. By adding additional links to the page, Microsoft is having users create derivative works based upon the web pages without permission from the page authors. This is a violation of the author's copyright and is equivalent to plagiarism by the end user, as facilitated by Microsoft.
Granted, this is essentially the Napster argument, where it could be legal (if the page is public domain for instance), but because MS is causing these tags to work without any input from the author, they are facilitating illegal uses. Bundling the browser with the OS does not put you at a disadvantage if you don't have a web page because it does not alter your work in any way. Smart Tags actually do alter the content, at least as displayed (much like taking someone else's essay, altering a few words, and publishing it as your own) and this is illegal. Cut and paste in the task bar also does not alter the content, but merely "quotes" from it.
Perhaps you don't care about the copyright on your work, but I do, and maybe if you thought about the issue more than apologizing for MS and calling it "whining" maybe you'd see what the real issues here are.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
hehe. Not so much on allowing them to be implemented, but just the whole moral side of them. It's a tricky issue and you summed up a good chunk of them really well, IMHO. :-)
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
is that statistics are unreliable at best. We've got conflicting numbers and interests all over the place, with all these surveys. In the end, it doesn't matter becuse Linux is a good server OS and it will continue to gain ground, especially as the younger people come up and start pushing it as an alternative to Windows et al.
What's really important isn't what numbers linux is doing now, but what it's going to be doing in the future.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I admit, this issue is a pretty slippery slope, and you give a bunch of good arguments for the Smart Tags, but I'm still finding it difficult to agree with you, simply because all the things you list are prefaced with "People's right", where the Smart Tags don't really have anything to do with people's rights.
* People's right to use translators
The translator is invoked directly by the user in order to allow them to understand the content in the first place. The translator does not attempt to alter the content of the page per se, but rather to redisplay it with the content fully intact in another linguisticformat.
* People's right to link a web browser to a dictionary so they can easily look up words that they don't know the meaning of
The link to the dictionary does not alter the presentation of the content itself.
* People's right to use third-party annotations, such a Third Voice
Third Voice got bitchslapped in court itself, and the presentation of ThirdVoice from my understanding was that it was not directly on the pages themselves but in ancillary areas.
Finally, style sheets, rendering, and caching don't affect content.
The real slippery portion is the Javascript and ad filtering. The first problem is that all these are on by default (essentially) and that it is a (relatively) rare choice to turn them off. This, despite what MS says, will come enabled by default in the release after XP.
The other issue is that all of these features remove the ability to see content. While it may be frivolous content (ads) or good content (like that cool martial arts flash animation) it's content that you are choosing to miss out on never the less, the same way you are choosing not to click every link on a web page. What the Smart Tags do is to add content rather than take it away. You, as a Smart Tags user, are modifying the author's creation in order to appropriate it for your own uses. It's not unlike plagiarism versus quoting. If you are disabling Java, you are sort of "quoting" the site, taking what lines you need as they are and leaving them intact. If you are enabling Smart Tags, you are committing something closer to plagiarism, where you take the author's work and displaying it as your own. The text is the author's work, and displaying it as links to your own sites is simply appropriating the work for your own purposes.
I have no problems with this if the author decides to put a notice on his page that it's in the public domain, but if it is copyright by some entity, then you are creating a derivative work and you owe royalties. It's the author's decision, much the same way it's a programmer's decision to GPL his code for public use or keep it for himself. Smart Tags violate the rights of the content author by actually altering their content without permission, as opposed to using whatever parts of it are desired without alteration. MS is allowing its users to plagiarize the web for its own benefit, and that's what is really wrong.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I'm very sad about this. Before I found /., suck was far and away my favorite site. I looked forward to Filler every Wednesday, and all the specials. I'll definitely miss Terry's artwork too.
Suck was a great site from the days of "content is king", which I still believe is true, although perhaps user submitted content really is the only way to survive. Sad, sad, sad. I'll miss Feed too, they always made me think, at least a little, which is a very admirable thing for a web drowning in pages and stories that deserve a feature from Something Awful.
Anyways, thanks for all the bile and deprecatory humor suck (including the self deprecatory). It's going to be a lonely net now that Hack and the Fish aren't on it.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Yeah, I definitely agree with you on the Apple menu thing. I do like the dock, but I wish there was a customizable apple menu for options I use a little less often.
:-)
The file type/creator associations are something that I haven't tried to deal with, but you're right that there should be some way of manually altering them, although I really hope they make it easier than it is in windows.
The only complaint I had other than the Apple menu is that the whole GUI feels kinda big (not hd size-wise, which is what I think you meant) but that all the icons take up too much space. Once I shrank the dock down, this feeling shrank with it, but it still feels kinda inefficient with screen real-estate, especially when working on an iMac.
As for the other stuff, it's probably because I use the console way too much for my own good
I hope apple does address all those issues you mentioned though (particularly the apple menu one)because an OS like the Mac should be able to balance more customization with ease of use. I think right now that they're still just trying to work out the kinks in the system, and hopefully they'll add obvious things like file type/creator stuff (and groups without netinfo manager) that really do need to be there. We can hope though!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I don't understand why you think the OS9 GUI is so much better. I was a rabid mac fan (i.e. I got tired of waiting for Copland, then Be, then OSX and jumped ship to Linux) but now that I've gotten a chance to explore the OSX interface I'm really pleased with it. Sure, it's not exactly the same as the old one, but change isn't necessarily bad.
:-). But it's still true to the overall spirit of the mac, which is fun, ease of use, and simple cool factor. I can't really say that any other OS out there has that feeling, and OSX is carrying that core of the Mac in to the future.
A ton of old Mac users feel betrayed or something because Apple threw out a decade+ worth of interface, when in fact a lot of the original good ideas are still there. The menu bar at the top of the screen. The trash can. Drag and drop (works better than it ever did for me in OS9 and before). The control panels. These are the major innovations that still distinguish the mac over windows (well, maybe not the trash can and control panels still) and they're still present.
Well what's actually different besides the looks? Button placement (still getting used to that one). No control strip. File system heirarchy. And the dock. Oh, and the apple menu is diminished (which I don't like either). Overall, these are minor concessions. The control strip will be replaced with dock apps. The file system is a result of unix, and it's a sacrifice that had to be made.
But overall, OSX feels comfy to me. It doesn't quite feel like a mac anymore, but that's because my conception of the mac carries a lot of baggage about performance and bland looks left over from my system 7 days
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
So Mr. Mundie...
... what are your super powers?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I don't usually like to respond to posts like this but, why don't you just get off your ass and write what you want yourself? I know I know... you don't have the time to do it, or the knowledge, or whatever, but then please stop bitching about what you're getting for free.
It seems that the golden rule of free software, the do it yourself mentality that actually produces code, is being lost in the noise of people who just want shit handed to them.
"Our browser's not good enough, Mozilla is slow!" Well, go help speed it up.
"Our interface sucks!" Change it to suit yourself.
"I want a good office suite!" Go pick one help out on it.
Geez... you'd think you were living in a world that didn't encourage users to participate in software development...
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Hey, don't legions of indie rockers obsess over Radiohead? Go on Napster and do a few searches under Radiohead and you'll see. Didn't caravans of fans follow around Phish (including all the old dead heads after Jerry Garcia died)? Go on Napster and you'll find a shitload of phish bootlegs just like the Dead had. Weren't the beatles initially written off as pop trash and boring guitar music?
The fact remains that people still like music, some of it is innovative (Radiohead), some of it is obsessive (Phish), and some of it is still pop trash (Destiny's Child) but that doesn't mean that they'll stay pop trash forever. Not that I think Destiny's Child is going to be the next beatles, but the parent is simply ignoring both the musical realities of today and yesterday.
I don't think you realize how big those old bands actually were because you've been caught in that fun little distortion field that says everyone around listened to Zepplin and the Dead and all those other bands, which isn't any more true than saying everyone listens to the Backstreet boys now.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I was going to mod you up but I wanted to reply instead. I think you're very correct about the metaphor idea. Tolkien's work isn't an allegory (like the Faery Queen by Edmund Spencer for example) in that the whole story isn't a metaphor, but the themes that run through it help grab us in ways that everyone who likes the books understands at some basic level.
It's important though that Tolkien's work isn't a wholly original creation. The precedent of Arthurian legends and Beowulf certaintly lend some important weight to his work. The fertility myth (Arthur) is a very important classic genre, and in many ways LOTR can be seen as inheriting from that. The theme of retribution after desolation via sacrifice is critical and is prevalent in many modern works as well. Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" can be construed this way for instance. This is in contrast to many other modern works that does not have such endings, like Paul Auster's "City of Glass" and Beckett's "Waiting for Godot".
The thing about literary critics is they are just waiting to show off how smart they are. No one gets upset with James Joyce for making "Finnigan's Wake" completely impenetrable (anyone who says they understand that work is a liar), but they rail against Tolkien for making a work that is just as original and epic in scale and still accessible at the same time. It's this kind of attitude that turns people off to literature (it's the same attitude that critics have towards "Harry Potter" right now) and it's really very sad. There's nothing I like as much as a challenging piece of art, but everyone wants a good story now and then. "Lonesome Dove" can sit happily next to my copy of "Gravity's Rainbow", and it depreciates neither.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"While the latest release from futureband2050 might be mildly entertaining, nobody is going to worship them the way throngs of indie rockers once went apeshit over Radiohead; nobody is going to follow them from city to city the way caravans followed Phish. Rock n Roll has become a dead religion.
"This year, I heard that a band called "The Beatles" won a bunch of awards. From the TV blub, they look kind of cute, and seem to be a band that sings shopworn 2-part harmonies over shopworn pop rock melodies. At the time, it occurred to me that I have not heard more than a 20-second blip from any of their songs. So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen idols and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?"
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
While I totally agree that artists should own their own music and that they are getting screwed royally by the record companies, I think that people underestimate how much the record companies do.
The companies don't just package up a recording and ship it off to the store. They have to hire a producer, pay for the cost of recording and producing the album, pay for the promotional materials such as videos on MTV and recordings for radio stations all over the world, pay for advertisements in magazines and such, and pay to scout out new acts.
That's a pretty hefty list. Now imagine that they do it for a ton of artists, where 1 in 100 is really successful. That's a lot of money that you don't recoup.
Because of all that, the cost of simply distributing music is not enough to pay the middleman, and companies should charge more than the very slim fee you're talking about. The thing is, they won't even get close to this number because they've already gone way above it and they're not going back now that they've got the cash cow.
They could use tools like Napster in order to really lower the costs of promotion, but they only see it as a threat to their bottom line so they're going after them full bore.
The other cause of this is the "big hit" model of record sales, where you rely on a band to put out one huge single to move volumes of records in order to recoup any other losses. Ideally, and this is what they used to do more, is that a company will invest in an artist to grow them a fan base and make them profitable overall. These kinds of artists don't sell in the mainstream, but don't put out the singles either and still sell a respectable amount of records. These kinds of artists aren't the cash cows of the industry who are gone 5 years later, but the bands who have a solid fanbase and sell records slowly over the longterm and wind up producing a solid back catalog. Developing artists like this costs a fair amount to start (although not as much as it does to launch a major hit band) but they wind up being solid profit columns on the balance sheet.
If the recording industry used Napster et al. in order to grow these kinds of artists for the long term they wouldn't be so worried about people pirating music. But they themselves have developed a very lucrative model based on singles that is now being threatened by mp3 swapping. The fact that they gouge consumers while only trying to give back fluffy one hit wonders is what's going to hurt them, because they didn't help to develop the artists, no one's going to help develop them.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
This is fact. Everyone I know in college got DSL or cable the instant they got their own places. While a lot of users may be getting dialup, once they, and their kids, try broadband, they're never going back.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Moulin Rouge's story is a retelling of the story of Orpheus. In short, the man is an amazing musician who goes down in to the underworld to bring his dead wife back in to the living. No one else was ever able to do this, but Orpheus is able to succeed by his musical talents. There is more to the story, as I'm sure many people know, but that's why it's predictable: you've heard the story itself a billion times before in different forms.
But it doesn't matter because Baz Luhrmann manages to retell the story in his own way that is very charming and funny and psychotic all at once. Everyone who's seen Strictly Ballroom or his version of Romeo and Juliet (the DiCaprio and Danes one) knows that his style is very fast paced and crazy, but visually stunning. That works perfectly in this film, which isn't meant to be taken as reality but as a depiction of a supernatural place, like in the tale of Orpheus. The plot is sappy, but it doesn't matter because it's told with humor and seriousness all at once, in a way that is so amazing visually that you won't believe your eyes.
The familarity of the plot is what allows you to handle the appearances, and the crazy appearances breathe new life in to an old tale. That's what makes this movie great and well worth seeing.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think he meant to post to this story.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I agree with you, and I think I've got some precedent for why it won't work: AOL.
/. just go on to prove this fact.
AOL is really all about centralization. The whole family unit can share an account, you use their email system located in their gigantic email/chat/web/IM/news/info/etc program that's really very pretty and friendly. You can centrally do everything you want from AOL itself, much like what Hailstorm is promising, and you never really have to leave it if you don't want.
And AOL is really popular. Fantastically so.
But relatively few people actually use all that centralization. They use AOL for email, web, chat, and IM, and that's mainly it. I've never met anyone (and I've known quite a few AOL users) who's actually used AOL itself to buy anything. People like to chat and build a community, and that's why AOL , and the internet is really successful, not for the ability to buy airline tickets right alongside a crockpot. Sites like
Microsoft isn't looking to build a community at all, they're looking to make things more convenient and ubiquitous. While people do like convenience (and the convenience of having email, web, chat, etc. in one place helps make AOL so popular) I don't think people are really looking for the kind of convenience that Hailstorm will offer. Granted, a lot of people will sign up for it, but I don't think it'll be that critical mass that'll make it ubiquitous. It's the same thing with Microsoft's instant messenger client. No one really uses it, because AOL was there first and everyone uses AIM because their friends use AIM. It'll be the same thing with Hailstorm, no one will use it because AOL was there first with all the convenient, one place info/shop-o-rama system, plus you get to use the chat rooms too!
Aside from AOL, portal sites like excite offer centralized calendar, customized news, portfolio, email accounts, and a thousand other features already. All from a central location. All available through any web browser. And when was the last time you heard someone hyping a portal site?
Not that Hailstorm wouldn't improve on the portal concept at all, but without something really good that takes it above and beyond (and storing your credit card numbers online is not enough of a bonus) it's just not going to go anywhere.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Good point, but do you really think Yopy is going to evolve the market with their $400 device? I think it'll be the ones who get the color screen and enough RAM to store a bunch of stupid arcade games down to a price point of a decent cell phone these days. It'll take a while, granted, but that'll sell like hotcakes. You need to be able to lose five of these things in a year and not really be hurting. The Yopy's just not on track to do this.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
This isn't bullshit at all because all but Solaris are considered free software. Besides, these are very viable alternatives to closed systems, and because apache is itself free software, it only goes on to prove that free software is a very viable model. Not bullshit but proof, if you actually decide to look at what he's really saying rather than lashing out at the numbers.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."