Nearly 20 years of hardware and software improvements, and the pinnacle of our achievements is exactly what we started with, but slower.
well, yes, you're right. but that's because of microsoft and proprietary software. if they didn't have a monopoly, we would have seen things like this running a lot earlier.
i don't think there's any need for intellectual property nowadays. we can share all information on the internet at no cost, so why don't we? intellectual property (which is a very strange term, by the way) laws were useful to organize distribution of knowledge, when distributing knowledge was difficult, but now we've solved that problem, so we don't need laws to govern who has access when to what, everybody can have access to everything all the time. indeed that is with modern technology the default position, and we should rather change society to reflect technology than change technology to reflect society. i am not aware of a single country that criminalized the car in order to protect the profits of horse studs.
To be 'fair', the vendor had pre-installed a couple utilities they wrote specifically for the hardware. But they could. How especially do they write the utils and support them for Ubuntu, and Fedora, and SuSE, and Debian, and...?
easily, you don't. that's the job of Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, and Debian, and...
what we have here is a symptom of a much deeper problem. most laptops have special keys. why aren't they standardized? why aren't the couple of utility functions you mention standardized? the answer lies in the money the hardware manufacturers get to make sure they don't standardize these things. there was a good story recently about a motherboard manufacturer that explicitly modified their BIOS to make sure that it wouldn't work on linux. one wonders why they did that.
i'm a professional classical pianist and composer. i've just got back from a course with some other very capable musicians. one in particular is a much better composer than myself, and it's a pleasure to spend time with him and hear some of his insights into music. he would find it nigh on impossible to get his music published, because he chooses to write in a style which is currently unfashionable. no company would be interested in distributing his music. maybe for him the p2p network is the way to go. it's the only chance he has to give people his music, because he sure as hell couldn't afford to distribute it himself.
i think we're talking about contract work here, which is how classical music developed anyway. if a work is only performed once or a very limited number of times (which was the usual state for classical music), there's no point in having copyright.
there are precious few christians who have even heard of the documentary hypothesis or the two source hypothesis. most christians remind me instead of children who know how quickly every car on the market does 0-60 but don't know how an internal combustion engine works.
just to clear things up, i think the op is talking about evolution as a thought experiment. he has not demonstrated (or even attempted to demonstrate) that it actually happened that way, he is just showing that evolution as a (scientific) theory would be up to the job.
you on the other hand have accepted that stage and have moved to applying the theory of evolution to the fossil record. here, it can of course be falsified. maybe it's worth being pedantic here once. what can actually be falsified is that life on earth developed in accordance with the scientific theory of evolution.
so basically you're looking at two different things between you.
you seem to be talking about the danger of any proprietary code. you could ask, how do i trick you into installing microsoft office on your computer and running it?
oh that's just a standard cache check. it really shouldn't be important anyway if the programmer pays attention to the api between javascript code and backend. in fact, if anything we have to be able to remove this check to allow custom javascript code to be run when accessing a page. an example would be if google published documentation about which ajax request performs which state change on the server in googledocs. then you could write your own frontend for googledocs.
nobody seems to have noticed this yet, so i'll spell it out.
what we're talking about is establishing the possibility for a new market for software to be run as client-side code in the browser. if you have a simple method of downloading and executing javascript in the browser for predefined webpages, you could offer customized javascript for common web-applications. don't like the standard interface for googledocs? go to www.howlingmadhowies-googledocs.com and download our client (for the fee of 20 bucks). your browser will now automagically use howlingmadhowie's googledoc interface when you go to googledocs.com.
this requires open apis between the javascript code and the backend, of course.
you're talking about establishing an api between the ajax-requests of the client code and the webserver. this shouldn't be a problem. if i spend a few minutes at the start of the project thinking about the api i want to use between my javascript and my php/perl/python/whatever running in apache, then i can modify the client code and the backend without worrying about what version of the client code is communicating with the backend.
how do you envisage that working? how can i upload my customized javascript to the bank's site, so you download it when you open the page on your computer? i really don't understand what you're talking about here.
eben moglen (the legal counsel for the free software foundation), has been looking into this issue since ca. 1995, so i don't think you told the fsf anything new.
Common sense dude. Why assume something else was done when if that was indeed true, events would have transpired in a completely different manner.
a rare and precious thing. a young person on slashdot who still believes in common sense. these are indeed the halcyon days of which nostalgia is made.
even the useless patents still have to be challenged, and that means going to court for a number of years. in that time, you will probably not be allowed to ship a product that supposedly infringes on these patents.
oh i'd love to see a gnu monopoly on the desktop and servers. if all computers out there had a working gnu userspace, working with them would be a lot easier. for purely technical reasons windows just doesn't cut it for me. i cannot do the things i want to do with it. i say gnu userspace because i rarely interact with the kernel directly.
as for the monopoly, i can't see a gnu monopoly being a bad thing. much like a state monopoly on the rail network is actually a good thing (as we have seen in great britain)
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly 20 years of hardware and software improvements, and the pinnacle of our achievements is exactly what we started with, but slower.
well, yes, you're right. but that's because of microsoft and proprietary software. if they didn't have a monopoly, we would have seen things like this running a lot earlier.
i don't think there's any need for intellectual property nowadays. we can share all information on the internet at no cost, so why don't we? intellectual property (which is a very strange term, by the way) laws were useful to organize distribution of knowledge, when distributing knowledge was difficult, but now we've solved that problem, so we don't need laws to govern who has access when to what, everybody can have access to everything all the time. indeed that is with modern technology the default position, and we should rather change society to reflect technology than change technology to reflect society. i am not aware of a single country that criminalized the car in order to protect the profits of horse studs.
To be 'fair', the vendor had pre-installed a couple utilities they wrote specifically for the hardware. But they could. How especially do they write the utils and support them for Ubuntu, and Fedora, and SuSE, and Debian, and ...?
easily, you don't. that's the job of Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, and Debian, and ...
what we have here is a symptom of a much deeper problem. most laptops have special keys. why aren't they standardized? why aren't the couple of utility functions you mention standardized? the answer lies in the money the hardware manufacturers get to make sure they don't standardize these things. there was a good story recently about a motherboard manufacturer that explicitly modified their BIOS to make sure that it wouldn't work on linux. one wonders why they did that.
i'm a professional classical pianist and composer. i've just got back from a course with some other very capable musicians. one in particular is a much better composer than myself, and it's a pleasure to spend time with him and hear some of his insights into music. he would find it nigh on impossible to get his music published, because he chooses to write in a style which is currently unfashionable. no company would be interested in distributing his music. maybe for him the p2p network is the way to go. it's the only chance he has to give people his music, because he sure as hell couldn't afford to distribute it himself.
i think we're talking about contract work here, which is how classical music developed anyway. if a work is only performed once or a very limited number of times (which was the usual state for classical music), there's no point in having copyright.
there are precious few christians who have even heard of the documentary hypothesis or the two source hypothesis. most christians remind me instead of children who know how quickly every car on the market does 0-60 but don't know how an internal combustion engine works.
just to clear things up, i think the op is talking about evolution as a thought experiment. he has not demonstrated (or even attempted to demonstrate) that it actually happened that way, he is just showing that evolution as a (scientific) theory would be up to the job.
you on the other hand have accepted that stage and have moved to applying the theory of evolution to the fossil record. here, it can of course be falsified. maybe it's worth being pedantic here once. what can actually be falsified is that life on earth developed in accordance with the scientific theory of evolution.
so basically you're looking at two different things between you.
you seem to be talking about the danger of any proprietary code. you could ask, how do i trick you into installing microsoft office on your computer and running it?
oh that's just a standard cache check. it really shouldn't be important anyway if the programmer pays attention to the api between javascript code and backend. in fact, if anything we have to be able to remove this check to allow custom javascript code to be run when accessing a page. an example would be if google published documentation about which ajax request performs which state change on the server in googledocs. then you could write your own frontend for googledocs.
you're talking about the affero gpl which was released in 2002. stallman is very much aware of this issue and has been since the mid 90s.
nobody seems to have noticed this yet, so i'll spell it out.
what we're talking about is establishing the possibility for a new market for software to be run as client-side code in the browser. if you have a simple method of downloading and executing javascript in the browser for predefined webpages, you could offer customized javascript for common web-applications. don't like the standard interface for googledocs? go to www.howlingmadhowies-googledocs.com and download our client (for the fee of 20 bucks). your browser will now automagically use howlingmadhowie's googledoc interface when you go to googledocs.com.
this requires open apis between the javascript code and the backend, of course.
you're talking about establishing an api between the ajax-requests of the client code and the webserver. this shouldn't be a problem. if i spend a few minutes at the start of the project thinking about the api i want to use between my javascript and my php/perl/python/whatever running in apache, then i can modify the client code and the backend without worrying about what version of the client code is communicating with the backend.
you're talking about tivoization. that's not a good solution.
how do you envisage that working? how can i upload my customized javascript to the bank's site, so you download it when you open the page on your computer? i really don't understand what you're talking about here.
it already is standard practice. never trust javascript (or a java client). in fact, never trust any client software.
what a load of crap. stallman isn't terrified about 'touching anything to do with non-GPL code'
you're talking about the afferoe gpl. this has been about since march 2002
eben moglen (the legal counsel for the free software foundation), has been looking into this issue since ca. 1995, so i don't think you told the fsf anything new.
at the moment, the link goes to a thread with 5 posts, none of which seem to have been written by an upset person.
i thought there were patent problems making touch-screen capability impossible.
Common sense dude. Why assume something else was done when if that was indeed true, events would have transpired in a completely different manner.
a rare and precious thing. a young person on slashdot who still believes in common sense. these are indeed the halcyon days of which nostalgia is made.
even the useless patents still have to be challenged, and that means going to court for a number of years. in that time, you will probably not be allowed to ship a product that supposedly infringes on these patents.
they would truly be liberated from the borg.
oh i'd love to see a gnu monopoly on the desktop and servers. if all computers out there had a working gnu userspace, working with them would be a lot easier. for purely technical reasons windows just doesn't cut it for me. i cannot do the things i want to do with it. i say gnu userspace because i rarely interact with the kernel directly.
as for the monopoly, i can't see a gnu monopoly being a bad thing. much like a state monopoly on the rail network is actually a good thing (as we have seen in great britain)
that depends on the copyright.